Berklee Blogs checks in with Camilo Puche, a Music Business major and fall intern, midway through his internship with Conductor’s Cooperative Management, a management company providing worldwide representation and management for classical music conductors. In today’s blog, Camilo tells us how interns should approach mistakes as an opportunity to improve themselves…

One of the most important advantages of being an intern is the fact that interns are “allowed” to make mistakes and will most likely not get fired. I say this not with the intention of justifying laziness or incompetence. On the contrary, I say it because it gives the intern a chance to be proactive and try different ways to perform the job. If things don’t turn out the way we want them to or if there are unexpected results, interns will always get a second chance.

In order to get something out of those mistakes, we have to be self-critical and very analytical. When the day is over and we go home it may be helpful to think about the things that we could do better. How can I make better use of my time? Did I do everything in my power to accomplish today’s task? Did I respond to my boss’ and my own expectations today? Some of these may be questions that we ask ourselves in order to learn from the experience at hand.

A very valuable lesson that I take out of my internship is that I need to learn how to make better use of my time in the office. When I started, I would wait until I got to the office to start preparing the things that I had to do, which led to me spending lots of time preparing as opposed to working. Through this auto-critical process I realized that if I spend fifteen or twenty minutes at the end of the day making a list and organizing my schedule for the next day, my time at the office would be much more efficient.

Mistakes are probably the best teachers that a person has, and in no way being self-critical is a sign of weakness. On the contrary, it takes great courage to be able to see that we are doing something wrong and if we try to fix it, it will improve the way we operate in the workspace and enhance our overall performance.

As I said before, interns are “allowed” to make mistakes without getting fired. However, it is important that we take the opportunity to learn from those mistakes and fix the things that need to be fixed before the internship is over. If we are efficient in doing this, a much more prepared professional will get out of the internship and into the workforce.

 

Read Camilo’s Other Posts:

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Thoughts on Beginning an Internship

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Bio

Although Camilo had always had a deep interest in music, it was not until he was in seventh semester of Law School in his hometown of Barranquilla, in the Caribbean cost of Colombia, that he decided to make a radical change in his life and become a full time music student. After only one year of private instruction, Camilo was admitted to the National School of Arts in Habana, Cuba and four years later graduated with honors from trumpet performance.

Camilo is finishing his last semester of Music Business at Berklee and is a current intern at Conductors’ Cooperative Management and Boston Concert Artists, two sister companies that provide representation for classical music conductors and world-renowned cellist Suren Bagratuni. He is fluent in Spanish, English and German, and is focusing in finding engagements for artists in Latin America and Germany.

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