How can you make the most of your college opportunities like jobs, internships, and other programs? Our guest Jeff Pickering has extensive experience work with students and he shares some insight in this episode.
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ABOUT THE GUEST
Jeff Pickering
Jeff Pickering is Director of Academic programs at the American Enterprise Institute. AEI is a leading public policy think tank in Washington, D.C. and its academic programs team seeks to renew healthy civic engagement on college campuses by equipping and developing student leaders with the scholarship of the institute. Unique to this work at AEI’s Initiative on Faith & Public Life, an outreach effort of Academic Programs to Christian college students and faculty. Jeff moved to Washington to work for Russell Moore at the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. He previously worked in a local church ministry and government affairs in his home state of Texas. He is a graduate of Texas A&M University. He and his wife, Chelsea, have a son and a daughter.
TRANSCRIPT
Katie Wussow:
Welcome to this episode of Launch Your Life, a personal and professional development podcast for twenty-somethings by 49 Financial. I’m your host Katie Wussow, and I’m the Director of Learning and Development here at 49. And we’re in the middle of a series all about landing your very first professional job, where we’re sharing stories, wisdom and practical skills that are designed to help you get your first job out of college. Now, today’s guest is Jeff Pickering, who’s the Director of Academic Programs at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC. If you’re not familiar with AEI, they are a leading public policy think tank and the Academic Programs team seeks to renew healthy civic engagement on college campuses by equipping and developing student leaders. In short, they’re all about investing in the next generation, just like we are at 49. Jeff is also a longtime friend of mine, a friend of 49 and a graduate of Texas A&M University, where I believe he was student body president back in the day. Jeff has extensive experience working with students to maximize their college experiences, whether it’s an internship, a job, a volunteer opportunity, or another type of academic program. He’s here today to share how you can make the most of this unique time in your life. In the episode, he’s breaking down what you should be looking for in your internships (this was a surprise to me personally). He’s also sharing how to make sure you’re able to do real work during your internships and not get stuck getting people coffee all summer. And he’s also talking about the biggest mistake he sees young people making in the workplace that will hold you back. Let’s dive in.
So, it is my pleasure to introduce a friend of mine as well as a friend of 49 Financial – Jeff Pickering. Welcome Jeff to the Launch Your Life podcast.
Jeff Pickering:
Thanks, Katie. Thanks for the invitation. I am a friend of 49 Financial and it’s fun to see where this business is after some conversations in the very early days at Chey’s in downtown Austin with Travis Penfield, about what it could be and then to actually see what it now is and that you’re now hosting a podcast for 49 Financial, it’s fun. So, thanks for having me.
KW:
Yeah, it’s a lot of fun. Especially I know you guys have watched this company for a while and so I’m sure it’s really exciting to see all the good work that’s coming out of the company, but we’re having you on today because I was telling you before we started that I don’t think I know a single person in my entire network of people that has as much experience with college students, particularly college students in internships as you and so we’re going to pick your brain on that and you’re going to tell us all the goods. I want to ask you first a wildcard question which is not on topic, but I think might be fun for the entire series that we’re doing here, what was your first professional job?
JP:
My first full time job was in government affairs, particularly procurement consulting. So, I wanted a job in Austin, my wife, who was my girlfriend at the time who I wanted to be my wife, lived in Austin. So, I thought we should I thought I should get a job in the same city where she was going to be working. I found a job in Austin, Texas, working for a pretty small, once might call it boutique, they’re trying to make it sound cooler than it actually is, consulting firm. I actually joined in a communications role because I was a communications major. I really enjoy writing and eventually podcasting and other types of things like that. So, I joined to write for the CEO and write newsletters to prospective clients, that sort of thing. A little under a month in, I showed up to work one morning at 8am and already had an email from the CEO about what a terrible writer I was, and “just don’t even know what they’re teaching in college anymore” was kind of the tone of the email. I remember walking out into the hallway and wondering if I still had a job because it was a little unclear from said email. Thankfully I did and then I shifted over to be essentially an associate on the consulting side of the business, but I wouldn’t let that be the final word. Eventually, I think I won her back over and was able to do some comms work there as well. But I was at a government affairs firm and the clients that I worked with were mainly interested in social infrastructure technology solutions for some state businesses, but a lot of local, so I spent a lot of time pounding the pavement of city halls and working with water utility district managers or transportation infrastructure projects. Definitely not the thing that you go to college to do out of school, but a great first job and I learned a lot.
KW:
If you had to pick one major thing that you learned that is still super relevant for you today, what would that be?
JP:
Learning how to ask for a meeting was by far the most important skill set I learned in that job and to the credit of the CEO of the company, who told me I was a terrible writer. It’s something I really learned from her, and she took the time to really spell out in a sort of template way, how you would go about asking for a meeting for a prospective client, which in that context, would be like a VP of Sales at Oracle, or some other large corporation. So how you would go about writing an email to a prospective client, or how you would go about writing an email to your client’s prospective clients. So, in this case, it might be a city manager, or it might be somebody in the procurement department of a large university in Texas. And the reason I say that’s so important is because every job I’ve had since then, you are writing pitch emails to your clients, your customers, your constituents, your donors. This is something that has been applicable for my work, whether that work was in a for-profit business, or a nonprofit ministry, or political advocacy. That is by far the thing that has been most helpful from that first job moving on. I learned that writing an email to try to get a meeting with the city manager about their water leak problem and my clients solution for it is actually very similar to writing an email to a legislative director on Capitol Hill to meet about an issue that I actually personally really care a lot about.
KW:
It’s so interesting when you reflect on your career and different jobs that you’ve had and like what you just said, I had to learn how to set up a meeting. It sounds like nothing, like it’s no big deal, but it’s actually so important and not that easy. It’s a real skill that you have to practice and actually learn how to do it’s not something you just automatically know how to do.
JP:
Right, right. And that’s something that I talk to, whether it’s people on my team or interns, is that oftentimes, when you’re starting out in your career, you often think about administrative tasks of which emailing tasks per meeting feels like an administrative task. You think of that as like a barrier to the real thing, the real work, but something that I’ve learned over time, and I’ve been told over time by bosses is that the administrative stuff is the work. And so yeah, emailing to set up a meeting is a very applicable skill.
KW:
Yeah, there’s a lot of wisdom there. And you’ve had a lot of opportunities to share that kind of wisdom with college students throughout your career. Tell us a little bit about how you have come to work with so many interns throughout your career and specifically your current role at the American Enterprise Institute.
JP:
Yeah, so I’ll start there. So, I’m the Director of Academic Programs at the American Enterprise Institute. AEI is one of the nation’s leading public policy research institutions, better known here in Washington. DC as a “think tank”, which I have to say of all the jobs just short of working for Nancy Pelosi, it is probably the most humorous to tell somebody when you like, go back home to a state like Texas for a wedding I work at a “think Tank.”
KW:
It sounds like a made-up job.
JP:
It’s totally made up. I do feel very lucky to be here. So, I mean, this in both sort of the derogatory way that somebody might think I can’t believe you get paid to do that. Well, I also can’t believe I get paid to do this, but that’s because AEI is nearly 100-year-old institution, and the scholars that have come through here are people like Scott Gottlieb, who’s a former FDA commissioner, who was on Face The Nation just about every single Sunday morning, throughout the pandemic, talking about not only how public policymakers ought to be thinking about pandemic policy, but also how everyday Americans could deal with all the questions coming up. People like Jonah Goldberg, co-founder of The Dispatch, weekly columnist with LA Times, and whose political punditry many of us have relied on through his podcast The Remnant and many other places. To other scholars who have just a particular expertise in either corner of the world for foreign policy issues or area of our federal government such that they are often called upon to testify before Congress or to meet with ambassadors. I mean, it’s one of the funniest things coming in and out of our building when I see people who look like their generals, and then I look and earlier this week saw some like Swedish military people leaving the office, and I’m assuming they were here meeting about the war in Ukraine and being advised by scholars here. So that’s sort of a picture of what a think tank does. And my role as Director of Academic Programs here is to provide for opportunities for college students to engage with our work, and it’s an interesting twist for me working with that community of college students because it’s actually not our internships. So, what my team and I are doing isn’t particularly within internships because it’s a pretty large organization. Our interns go through our talent development department, but we get to provide for opportunities throughout the year on their campus through a student chapter program we have called Executive Councils, where students are engaging with our scholarship through book clubs, or through hosting scholars on their campus for an event throughout the year, and then we also have a variety of conferences that those students are able to come and hear from the leading scholars of the day on a variety of issues. And then one of the other things that we do, the real sort of flagship program is every summer throughout June, we host weekly seminars on big public policy topics, and it’s a program called our Summer Honors Program, which I’ll just make a little plug for here. If you just google AEI Summer Honors Program, you’ll find the application and information. We’ve got people, both AEI scholars like Corey Shockey, who leads our defense department, Michael Strain, who leads our economics research department, teaching on topics like democratic capitalism and thinking about war and also, outside scholars like David French teaching on the promise of pluralism in this country, and so it’s week long seminars for undergraduates or just recently graduated seniors to come to DC and learn from in a small seminar style class, these incredible minds and public policy thinkers and columnists, as well as get connected to our network. One event is, and it’s sort of small on the agenda of the week that students are here but it’s really big and its impact, the Young Professional Coffees that we set up because your professors can be very helpful to you landing a job at a school. An institution like AEI in a tea like mine that’s particularly tasked with engaging with college students can be very helpful to landing a job but ultimately, the cliche is true that it does come down to who you know. And so, setting up students with coffees with young professionals throughout the city is a really impactful experience for them. And the best part of all of this that we get to do is all of our programs are all expenses paid. So, it’s a very exciting way to roll out different pipelines to DC in the public policy world, to students all across the country for these high impact professional and educational opportunities. What drew me here to do this work was that it just so happened that throughout my career, I was often in a place of taking on the management of interns at my companies or organizations. When I came to DC to work with your husband, Katie, we really built an internship program at our public policy advocacy organization, from the ground up in many ways. I mean, the organization had had interns coming through but there wasn’t a structure to the internship process that really offered professional and educational development. Because of that structure that we built and the way that it recruited for itself, year over year across the four years or so that we ran that program spring, summer and fall we had about 50 college students come through that internship program. It’s funny because looking back now on my career, I don’t think I could have predicted that working with college students, working with interns, was going to be the theme of my career that it has turned out to be but I love it because it’s very fun to get to be a small part of somebody’s story and then see where they end up 2, 3, 10 years later on down the road. It’s especially meaningful in the kind of work that we do in Washington, DC, where you want to make an impact in American life and it’s really difficult to do that and so to know that you’re making an investment in the next 10, 20, 30 years, because you’re getting to interact with somebody at a really pivotal point in their life when they’re in their early 20s is really exhilarating and motivating.
KW:
It’s really incredible work that you guys are doing because you’re not just like, oh, well, we should have an internship program because that’s going to make it easier to recruit. You do have an internship program and that does make it easier to recruit probably, but you’re saying we are actually wanting to invest in young people and connect them to our work in a meaningful way so that they can take that with them wherever they go. And that’s a real distinction from what other organizations are doing.
JP:
Yeah, and it’s cool because this place has always had young people roaming its halls for the whole 100-year history. And many of our scholars came to Washington DC through AEI and oftentimes they were coming as interns, but now these academic programs have been running for almost 15 years and it really is incredible to see the impact with just a little bit more intentionality placed in investing in young people, undergraduates, post grads that it can make for an organization if you keep up that investment.
KW:
When I look back on my college experience I did have a great experience, I had a good time, I made good friends, I made good grades and all of that stuff but if I’m really honest, I don’t know that I really maximized the opportunity that it is to be a college student, and all of the different resources that you have and the people that are at your disposal, and the professors and the career counselors and the internships and the opportunities and like these kinds of things that you’re putting together for students through AEI. I’m not totally sure I took advantage of all of that stuff. So, what kinds of opportunities should students that are listening be actively looking for? And how can they make sure they are maximizing the opportunity to grow that it is to be a college student?
JP:
That’s a great question. I think that is a tension that a college student is always going to be managing because there’s so much competition for your time when you’re on campus. And it is important to keep the first things first, right? With your school, with potentially a job that you have and just a note on that as I would look through students resumes either for full time work on my team now or back when I was running an internship program, it was not a small thing and was often a very impressive thing to see that somebody was working while they were also a full-time student. And so, keep first things, first, but I would say don’t sleep on the kinds of speakers that are rolling through a campus. It’s often the case and we’re sending out some of DCs most sought after speakers all throughout the country for events on campus, and a solid event on a weeknight on a college campus somewhere in America, it’s going to draw somewhere between 30 and 50 people, which is crazy because some of these men and women in DC could draw probably 100 people at an event here. So, the reason I say don’t sleep on like guest speakers on your campus is because you’re going to have an opportunity to go up and meet some really dynamic and motivating professionals that are coming through your campus and it’s going to be a smaller environment than it will be when you’re out of school and trying to go to an event. I think another thing to be looking for are opportunities, whether they’re internships or professional development and educational programs like Summer Honors that we run at AEI, look for opportunities that are going to ask something significant of you. Because if they’re willing to ask for an investment on your part, the chances are pretty high that the company, the organization, the ministry, the nonprofit is going to have an investment to give you in return. So, for internships, that’s a place that is going to really rely on you to do solid work, and to do real meaningful work. If that’s an educational or professional development opportunity, how much reading are they going to ask you to do ahead of that seminar? For our summer honors classes, most of the classes have about 250 pages of reading for the five days of the seminar. We’re asking that of students because we’re expecting a lot of them in the program, and I think they get more out of it because of that mutual investment.
KW:
Yeah, that’s good. What do you think is the key to being able to do real, meaningful work as an intern versus some of the more menial tasks that we might associate with internships as a stereotype? Is there like a secret sauce to making sure that you’re doing real stuff instead of getting people coffee?
JP:
Yeah, it’s excelling in the little things like getting people coffee early on, as soon as possible. And I’ll give a story here that I’ve told many, many times, which is about one of the fall semesters, that we had at the ERLC, the organization where we built the internship program. I had recently had a back surgery and so I hadn’t been in the office for a little while ahead of the interns first orientation day and then when I did show up to the office the day before, I wasn’t able to pick up the mail that had been stacking up because many of us had been gone for like a week or two for different reasons. And so there was a very large pile of mail right inside the small office building that we have, and I had just kind of kicked it to the side because I wasn’t able to bend down and picked it up. I was a little embarrassed about that for the interns that were coming the next day. So, they show up on their first orientation day and we have a good first day of meetings, and then the very next day, so let’s say it’s on a Wednesday of that week, I come in and that pile of newspapers and mail had been moved. It was not in the entryway, and it was in the conference room on the table organized with little post it notes on top of each pile either organized to who was sent to or like the magazines were in one stack and the bills were organized. It was very impressive and took a little bit of effort on my part to match handwriting to figure out which intern it was but it’s never a surprise when an intern is taking that kind of initiative with the small stereotypical intern tasks within the first couple of days of being on the job. They are presenting themselves to the full-time staff as somebody who can be trusted with more meaningful work and so faithfulness with the small things will lead to greater trust with bigger things. And you know, the other thing I would say is when you do get some face time with people in leadership at your organization, or with clients or important customers, take time to ask questions and get to know people, get to know them and about their career. Don’t be afraid to ask people and you know, you can sort of feel out the best way within your company if that’s something that you can do face to face or if you should send an email or make a phone call, or even just setting up a phone call or a Zoom with somebody if you’re in a remote internship environment but people love to talk about their own experiences and people love to give advice. If you’re thinking about law school and you can meet the General Counsel at the company that you’re interning, take that opportunity and don’t overdo it. 30 minutes is plenty to ask for. If they want to go longer, they can go longer but I would say excel in the small stuff and you’ll be trusted with bigger stuff. Don’t be afraid and in fact, be proactive to ask people about their own careers and have intentional questions for how you want to make sense of what they have to share for your own career.
KW:
It’s not bad advice for somebody of any age, let’s be honest. Be faithful in the small things, ask people a lot of questions. We can all do that better. So, these students that are coming through your programs at AEI, these students that you worked with in DC, they’re not stupid. These are smart, smart kids that are very academically accomplished, probably have strong resumes, and all of that stuff. But we all make rookie mistakes. We all make those mistakes like copying the wrong person on the email or showing up wearing the wrong thing. What are some rookie mistakes that students often make when they’re in professional environments? And to the extent that they can be avoided, can you help us avoid them?
JP:
Yes, so this is going to, hopefully not contradict what I just said about being willing to reach out and ask people for time, whether that’s for a coffee or a lunch, or even just a 30-minute chat. But I would say one of the most common mistakes that students make is being too familiar, especially through tools like Slack, or other company chats, or even on Zoom. I mean, I have some friends and family members actually that work with interns at really large companies, and we were sort of trading stories during the pandemic because we were all curious how internships were being affected by remote work and what they were seeing as some of the differences in ways that interns were able to integrate or experience some turbulence in their ability to integrate with their teams when everybody was remote. And so, I think it’s true for things like zoom as well as tools like Slack where students are way too familiar in the professional world with people that they should be a little bit more formal with. This was actually a piece of advice that I was given when I was an intern here in DC, and really this probably is even true just for vertical relationships, but for all relationships in the workplace is to be formal until you’re invited to be familiar. And so, I would encourage, especially the smart, accomplished driven young person that’s getting coveted internships or professional opportunities to ask a lot more questions before they offer their own hot take. To just watch people discuss things on a company slack before jumping in and offering your own thoughts or solutions. Hopefully, if you’ve landed a good internship or good opportunity, you have somebody who is your direct supervisor, assignment coordinator, a lot of companies now have mentors within their organization. Hopefully there’s somebody you can go to that’s on the full-time staff, with your thoughts or your opinions or somebody that’s a safe place to say like, hey, I was thinking about jumping in that conversation. Would that be appropriate? Is this the kind of place that would be fine for that? That is the kind of stuff that you can’t learn in school, you have to learn on the job. But if I can put a pithy phrase on it, and again, this was advice that I received from one of my bosses at an internship in college was to be formal until you’re invited to be familiar. And if you do that, that’s a really good insurance policy from some of the mistakes that can be made in good faith.
KW:
I love how practical that is, but also flexible for lots of different situations. And I think too if you’re going into a healthy work environment, which hopefully, most of us land in healthy work environments, if you’re holding back too much, you’ll have a team member or a supervisor, or somebody say, hey, I really want to know what you think about that. That will invite you to even jump in. It’s much better to do it that way than to kind of be told to hold back a little bit.
JP:
Yes, that is exactly right. I found and continue to find that when you’re working with interns, and so this is to anybody who might be supervising interns, you can generally tell within the first couple of weeks of a semester or an internship contract timeline, if this is somebody that you are going to need to help be a part of their humbling or to be a part of their blossoming. Is it somebody that you’re going to have to say, hey, you can speak up, you’ve got some great things to offer here, you can take on that challenge, you can take this this meeting with a client or constituent or is it somebody who you’re going to have to say, why don’t you clean the conference room after this meeting? Both of those lessons, whether it’s boosting somebody’s confidence, or being a part of helping humble somebody who could really benefit from that, that’s a fun thing for supervisors to figure out. I will just say, definitely on the intern side of things, and I have been both, would rather be somebody who is asked to come to the table rather than asked to take a step back.
KW:
Yeah, you know, we all have our tendencies, and we have to live within those tendencies. So, we’ve talked about internships, and we’ve talked about like lectures and these more immersive experiences that you have at AEI. What are some other experiences that are available to students that you think are really valuable in preparing them for professional life?
JP:
Experiences to travel. This doesn’t have to be glamorous and traveling to Europe or Southeast Asia. It could just be traveling to a different town within your state or a neighboring state or somewhere else in the US. The opportunities available to students to travel and experience cultures that are not their own cultures where they might not speak the same language or in this country, even if you speak the same language, not quite with the same dialect, or cultural assumptions. The opportunities that you have in college, to travel and to be embedded in a culture that is not your own is so immensely valuable for the workplace because it helps you learn how to communicate, and it helps you build a sense of confidence when you feel really out of place. As just one applicable example, on a podcast that my team hosts here at AEI called The Campus Exchange, where students involved in our executive council program, get to interview an AEI scholar, we end every episode with the same question. The student asks the scholar, “what is one thing you know now that you wish you knew when you were in college?” and it’s always very interesting the responses that they get. A scholar that I mentioned earlier, Jonah Goldberg, he said something that I thought was really wonderful practical advice, which is, college is a time in your life when you can really afford to be poor and so don’t be afraid to spend money to travel and experience other places. For him, in college, it was like a few weeks or a summer or semester or a year, but he spent some time teaching English classes in Prague, because it was a way for him to get to a different country. He didn’t make much money doing it, but he could afford to be poor. Whereas the deeper you get into life, and if you get married and have kids, it gets a lot harder to take on some of those experiences. So, I would say travel and again, not for the sake of a solid Instagram feed. If you want to do that, okay, fine, maybe you can monetize that as well. But I think it’s valuable because it’s really valuable to be in a culture that’s not your own. Like Jonas said, college is a time when you can afford to live on just a little and sometimes that’s what it takes to go travel to a place that’s not your own.
KW:
That’s so true. That wasn’t really even popping into my mind when I asked the question, but your youth is a time of figuring a lot of things out. And as you figure a lot of things out, how to be a person, adulting like the kids call it these days, or maybe the kids don’t even call it. I don’t even know what the kids call it anymore. Listeners, let us know what it’s called. But all of that builds a lot of confidence, like if I can do this, I can do this harder thing. And if I can do this harder thing, I can do this really hard thing but when you’re doing all of that in a foreign environment, the confidence building is at a completely different level. I’ve had some pretty substantial experiences in foreign countries in my life, I still to this day, I am in my late 30s and I think well if I did that, I could do this thing. It’s built a lot of confidence in my ability to just kind of handle whatever comes up.
JP:
Right and another reason I think that’s good not only because it helps you build confidence to tackle impostor syndrome when you’re in the workplace, which is a real thing, and I have felt in every job I’ve ever had, but also because it helps you learn that it’s okay to not know everything and it’s okay to be uncomfortable. I sent the questions, Katie that you sent around to my team, many of whom are much closer to their college graduation date than I am. And I said, hey, we’re recording this episode. Give me any solid advice that you’d love to pass on to a show like this. One of them loves to tell the students that she works with that, it’s okay for you to not know everything. You’re going to get a job, you’re going to be fine, take a deep breath. And when you are 22, you still got eight more years in your 20s – it’s going to be okay.
KW:
That’s good perspective.
JP:
And I like that. Yes, it’s good perspective.
KW:
You’ve given us so much wisdom here. I am so grateful for your time. Can you remind us again where we can go to learn more about the Summer Honors Program at AEI?
JP:
Yes, so our organization’s website is AEI.org. So that’s the American Enterprise Institute, AEI.org. And you can hit the backslash summer, dash honors, dash program. You can also just google AEI Summer Honors, and it’ll pop up but it’s every June. So, applications are open right now and will be due by March 1st, 2023, for our courses happening in June of 2023. Just a quick word, if you’re an undergraduate student or if you are graduating this year as in 2022 or 2023, you are eligible, and we would love to get to know you.
KW:
Amazing! I hope that some of you are able to check that out and take advantage of such a great opportunity. Thanks so much Jeff, for sharing that with us. That is all we have for you on this episode of Launch Your Life. If you enjoyed the episode, please leave us a rating and review. It’s absolutely the best way to show your support and help others find the show. We appreciate you listening. We’ll catch you next time!
