Happy Memorial Day!

I hope you had a great long weekend and are ready to dive back into your internship! For this week, I’m gonna be taking you through creating a roadmap for your summer, setting up a work and documentation plan, and establishing a relationship with your mentor.

Roadmap for the Summer

First things first, you’re going to want to have a meeting with your manager and mentor where you ask them all the questions you have about the project and its scope, the scope being very important. You have to figure out the results they expect as well as how they expect you to achieve them.

Ask them about the objectives of the project, specific deliverables and how they want them presented, known challenges or risks, grey areas in the project scope, any specific tools or methodologies they’d like to see you approach the problem with, and how they’re going to be measuring your progress.

Once you have a concrete idea of what they expect, you can then provide your input on how you might expand it or improve upon the suggested methodology. One thing I will say here is to really take the idea of under-promise and over-deliver to heart. Oftentimes, we want to do so much and have all these wild ideas but while they can pass in personal projects or in college, you don’t want to promise something and not produce it in a workplace.

As for the actual roadmap, this should be a breakdown of how you expect to spend your time in the next 9 weeks on the various aspects of this project. Try to include everything from initial research to the making of the final presentations.

Work and Documentation Structures

If this is your first time in a corporate environment, it can be kind of confusing how you should go about structuring your work to do the best work. Here are the three key parts of a productive day:

1. Deep Work Sessions: You absolutely need to have at least two 1.5-hour sessions every day where you have complete focus on your work with no distractions. Even if you don’t do anything the rest of the day, these periods will help you significantly move the needle.

2. Meetings: Most are unavoidable and unproductive, a terrible combination. It can be scary to say no to a meeting as an intern but if it’s not directly with your team or the recruiters, you can safely skip them most of the time and do something more beneficial. But for the useful meetings, be very present and contribute all that you can, don’t be afraid to speak up.

3. Socializing: I think this is super important for your personal growth and relationship building and you should be socializing at least an hour or two per day as an intern. Examples are lunches, walks around the office, and talking around the desks. Don’t feel bad about doing this, I promise you, you do not need to be working around the clock.

Ask your teammates how they go about their days and incorporate any wisdom they have as well. In the end, you have to set up a schedule for you that lets you give your best while not burning you out.

Documentation as a Blocker

I don’t care what industry you’re in or what your role is, you NEED to document your work and ideas. However, a lot of interns don’t do that great of a job cause they’re more interested in actually doing the thing rather than writing about it. I completely understand the sentiment but it can actually be a great tool for evaluating and refining your ideas.

I know documenting sucks but I’m very confident that this process I’ve crafted after many years of trying and failing to stick with it will work for you too. There are really only four essential parts to documenting your ideas and the subsequent work and results:

1. What you’re thinking of doing and why

2. How you’re going to do it

3. Changes and lessons learned along the way

4. Results

So now, if we make it necessary to write down your idea and initial plan before you act on them, you’re already halfway done with “documentation”. After you’ve finished and before you go on to your next idea, make it a requirement to document the things that changed in your plan and the results of it. Here’s a very basic example:

Documenting in this fashion can save you from pursuing bad ideas (as you’ll have to justify them before starting) and leave you with a record of all your experiments that will come in handy later, like for end-of-internship presentations.

Team Mentor Relationship

There’s a 99.99% chance that along with a manager, you will be assigned a mentor from your team to help you throughout this journey. They can be an invaluable resource for getting an insight into the work, the company culture, and other tips for succeeding in your current and future roles.

The first thing you should talk to your mentor about is their expectations of you for this internship and your goals and areas of interest. The former is great for getting a sort of rubric of how you should perform this summer and the latter will help them tailor their advice and mentorship to you. For example, in my first internship, I mentioned that I was interested in learning more about UI/UX roles, and a few weeks later, my mentor introduced me to a friend of hers that was a manager for a User Experience team. Your mentor is much more than just an alternative to Stack Overflow or ChatGPT so use them as such.

In this week, you should also set up a plan with your mentor to have frequent (at least once a week) meetings. While these meetings will usually start off with a progress check, they can expand into conversations about working in general, the company and future prospects, how they spend their time and money outside of work, and so much more.

That’s it for week 2, create your own frameworks based on what I’ve provided and set yourself up for an awesome summer!

See ya next time!