7 tips to excel in your internship
First of all, congratulations on getting your internship! These are challenging times, and this is a great achievement. Don’t forget to take a moment to look back on your journey and be proud!
When Andrea (right) and I (left) realised we were the only grad interns at onboarding…
It’s no secret that internships can feel scary. A brand new environment. Feeling like you’re competing in the Hunger Games and trying to prove your mettle. Worrying whether that return offer will come through. The good news is, you’re far from alone. It’s typical for all interns - myself included - to go through these motions regardless of how qualified we may seem for a role.
Here are 7 tips (more detail below on each one) for nailing your internship and getting that return offer:
Manage expectations, including your own
Communicate upwards often
Options, not problems
“So what” - contextualise constantly
Network intentionally (not obsessively)
Be curious
Leave behind a great artifact
1. Manage expectations, including your own
Be clear with your manager about your goals and have honest 2-way dialogue to set expectations appropriately. What are your goals for your internship project(s)? What are your personal development goals? Also important, what are your managers personal goals? What do they want to get out of your time working together? Are you both aligned? If not, where can you find common ground? It’s incredibly important to have this level-setting conversation upfront and to circle back periodically. It’s also good to socialise some of these agreed headlines with your key stakeholders to anchor their expectations and align what’s expected of you across the team/org.
Why? Without aligning expectations, it will be difficult for you to 1) get what you want from your internship and 2) to show you have made good progress at checkpoints across your internship.
Without this conversation, it will be even more challenging to take stock of 8-12 weeks’ work and for you to effectively gauge your performance, let alone be on the same page as your manager and other stakeholders.
Bottom line: Be clear about what you want to achieve, align expectations with your manager and review periodically
2. Communicate upwards often
Doing your work and making progress feels like it should be enough for everyone to know you’re being productive and delivering results. A lot of interns, including myself, initially want to go into their secret batcave, work our butts off on our project and emerge victorious to a deafening round of applause from our stakeholders.
This may have been our way of dealing with academic deliverables among other things in the past, but when it comes to internships (and professional work in general) your path to success is a heavily iterative one with many crossroads and milestones - it’s not a simple sprint. So it’s imperative you concisely communicate with stakeholders consistently to ensure maximum visibility of your ongoing efforts and to iterate on your project(s) effectively.
Why? The reality is that everyone is busy working as hard as you if not harder. Folks have only so much cognitive load they can give to you given the various happenings in their own lives - personal and professional. Make sure you maximise the value you deliver per unit of mental real estate available from your stakeholders. Focus on demonstrating massive impact with brevity.
An effective way to do this is to establish some kind of weekly update or notes that can be distributed to key stakeholders. During my internship at Google, I had a weekly update email that went out on Friday morning to my manager and key stakeholders. It”s important to also structure this email well. My usual format would be 3 sections: progress for the week, blockers/considerations and next steps. A clear succinct summary of what I had done, any potential issues I foresaw and what folks could expect me to do in coming weeks. This is a powerful device to make sure your efforts get visibility and ensure ongoing alignment of expectations with your stakeholders. Additionally, it’s also an exercise that can help you take a moment to reflect on your week and take stock of what you need to prioritise next.
Bottom line: Consistently communicate a structured, concise set of headline updates with your manager and senior stakeholders
3. Options, not problems
A pet peeve for any manager is being bombarded with problems and issues with no options for moving forward to resolve them. Particularly if they are not the local expert on the subject. As an intern, you will likely own something. It may even only be a small cog of a much larger machine, but you are likely to, or even expected to, know this cog far more intimately than your manager i.e. the operator of the machine.
When you go to your manager with issues, go with some hypotheses and options in mind.
Issues are usually symptoms of a problem that needs to be tackled. Present hypotheses for how issues may have presented themselves and potential consequences. Present options for tackling the issue, and try to rank these in some way e.g. risk vs reward/utility, technical cost vs revenue impact, precision vs accuracy, etc. Present yourself as the expert on the issue - as you likely will be anyway. It’s fine if your options are not used, but 9 times out of 10, a solution you suggest to an issue is likely to be taken on in some way.
Bottom line: Don’t just go to your manager with problems. Go with hypotheses for potential causes and present ranked options for a solution.
4. “So what” - contextualise constantly
A very common phenomenon is being given an assignment and then instantly diving into the work. You rush to complete that analysis or draw up that wireframe or put that report together. Then, as you present the results of all the great work you’ve done, you get stopped in your tracks by your manager: “So what?”
Some interns get caught out by this and conflate this as having produced poor quality work. What it usually means is that your manager is asking ‘why are these findings meaningful’. What should I do given your work. And this may take the form of more direct questions:
“How will this help us accomplish our goals and move metrics?”
“What actions should we take given your findings?”
“What does this mean for our roadmap?”
“How will this affect our team?”
Proactively think about the so-what by thinking about your work in the context of the overarching priorities of your org, and how your work will affect these.
Why? Your work may be great, but the so-what of your findings is what adds value to your team and org
Bottom line: Ask yourself “so what” and constantly contextualise your work with your org’s strategy and vision
5. Network intentionally (not obsessively)
One of the greatest superpowers an intern has, are three magic words :”I’m an intern”. These 3 words will get you facetime with almost anyone in the organisation. Some interns use it massively to their advantage to meet all kinds of people across the organisation in a short period of time. Some overdo it and try to meet every person under the sun. Some don’t realise the power of these 3 short words and miss opportunities.
My view is that, as with most things in life, you need to strike a balance with networking. And to strike a balance, you need to be intentional about why you’re meeting people. Your primary purpose for networking should be to help your project succeed by meeting folks who will become advocates for you and your work. Folks who have a clear WIIFT and who want you to succeed. These can include potential senior stakeholders and ‘near peers’. Secondary priorities may be exploring other areas of the org, sheer curiosity and more. Striking a balance between these priorities is important. There’s a point at which marginal utility for meetings starts to decay exponentially and usually it takes longer to reach this point for ‘primary’ meetings.
Why? You have limited time to demonstrate your impact and you want to optimise for that as much as possible. Ensure the time you have spent networking is primarily driving a successful outcome for your summer and maximising value.
Bottom line: Be mindful of the tradeoff between your limited time and the marginal utility of meetings
6. Be curious
Curiosity is another intern superpower. Be innately curious and ask lots of questions. As an intern, there are no stupid questions. The assumption is that you know far less than the median of your environment anyway. So take advantage of this free pass.
Take it a step further. Let curiosity embolden you. Use your curiosity to challenge your observations and ask insightful questions. Dialogue is good and conflict is good when it’s productive. Leverage your position to create proactive and meaningful dialogue as much as possible to try to add value where possible.
Why? To show that you can be a real peer to your team and that you don’t have the mindset of an applicant/intern, but rather a potential colleague.
Bottom line: Channel your curiosity into dialogue and outcomes
7. Leave behind a great artifact
Leaving behind a great easily accessible reference of your summer is invaluable..This will be important when your reviewers are being finalised and a decision is being made whether to hire you or not. It can help reiterate your greatest hits as an intern. This may be a microsite, a presentation, a doc or some other format.
If you’re an intern @ Google, feel free to take a look at my internship site: go/jegadeesh
Bottom line: Showcase your internship and your best work!
Bonus (Google interns): 3 extra tips for conversion
Take your conversion interviews seriously: it may be easy to think a couple of interviews don’t have much weight against a summer of work experience but these interviews are key to assess your foundational skills, growth over the summer and/or validate the impact you’ve made.
Only include strong advocates who know your work intimately as reviewers and references: it’s tempting to list any senior folks you meet as references for your conversion process, but this can backfire if they are unable to recall your work and impact in depth. Remember, the committee will be reviewing the impact you have made with your work, not who you know.
Distribute your internship output far and wide: once you have some great artifacts of your work in place, make sure you push for it to be very visible. Distribute it to folks you’ve worked with. Find opportunities to present your work in different forums, ideally adjacent to your team/org.