The Southwestern Company Internship Difference Blog
Learning to overcome rejection is probably one of the most under-rated skills in both life and business. At Southwestern Company, we assist college students in not only overcoming that fear, but in running a business to gain life skills to achieve their goals. It’s almost like a package deal!
A recent article in The Boston Globe entitled “Accepting Rejection” (click here for article) was sent to me by Yael Cohen, the mother of Southwestern Corporate Recruiter Eliav Cohen and a great Southwestern supporter.
The article talks tongue-in-cheek about how Harvard students are having to face more rejection – even though they attend such a prestigious, ivy-league school. The Office of Career Services even hosted a seminar on how to cope with rejection – something increasingly more common in a slumping economy.
This is not an issue with any of the student’s who have participated in Southwestern’s summer sales program. Anyone who has knocked on doors for a summer or more can tell you rejection is part of life. It comes with the territory. While shocking at first, you learn to overcome and deal with it.
Dan Moore, President of Southwestern, graduated from Harvard in the mid-1970s. He participated in the Southwestern Company’s summer sales program and was rejected numerous times daily while selling educational products to families door-to-door. In fact, he will tell you that rejection helped make him who he is today. Not only did he het his undergrad degree in three years, he later earned a Masters from Vanderbilt and has found success in the work place due to the perseverance, attitude and confidence he gained by accepting and overcoming rejection.
Southwestern’s summer internship is definitely a crash course in life. Anything that takes more “no’s” to get to a “yes” has a learning curve you can’t learn in the classroom. Nowadays, that degree, even if it is from Harvard, may not be enough. A legitimate, hard-working experiential education in sales can transfer to any field of study. And that is just one reason students choose to voluntarily run their own business selling Southwestern products.
If any students from Harvard are reading this… now might be a good time to consider a summer internship that will set you up to teach the campus seminar on rejection in the fall semester.
