The Hang of Things

By now, you’ve probably got into a rhythm around your office. You know who to go to for restaurant recs, you know the tech wizard to visit when your workstation crashes, and you know who the best ping pong player in the office is who you strive to beat. That’s awesome!

But this is also the time that your work starts getting serious, and issues around scope creep and a halt in progress can pop up. We’ll tackle that, connecting with an ideological mentor, and my opinions on common HR advice in this week’s letter.

Roadblock - Find Another Way

So at this stage, you’ve been researching and working on your assignment for two weeks or so and you might be starting to feel stuck. This is totally normal. When you start a new project, you’re bound to have tons of excitement but as you start to get into the weeds, the difficulties and unknowns start to show their faces.

I’m gonna give you the simplest advice on resetting and moving forward.

Identify

The first thing to do is acknowledge that your previous ideas and approaches were wrong. Then, you can identify what’s slowing you down. Is it a technical hurdle, changing project goals and a lack of clarity, or difficulty finding information? These are all things I, and almost every intern I know, have faced. It’s a part of the job.

Once you have this locked down, spend some time writing out why this issue is happening and how it contradicts what you previously thought. The point of this is to get to the core of the issue and eliminate any misconceptions so that the next step becomes easier.

Ask for Help

I know, I know. This sucks. It feels like giving up, like admitting defeat. Weren’t you supposed to figure this out on your own?

But trust me, your only responsibility is to get the work done. The sooner you go to your mentor or manager and get help in solving these issues, the faster you can keep moving forward. And oftentimes, the things you’re facing aren’t a fault with your method but are a problem caused by the surrounding infrastructure.

For example, one summer, I was working on taking in a bunch of data and manipulating it and presenting it in a dashboard. But the data was not data-ing. It was sparse and not updating in the timeframes I wanted. I thought this was an issue with my code and how I was reading the documentation. I spent two days banging my head against my keyboard… until my mentor came by to check up on me and asked me why I was calling data from the wrong source. I was confused, the documentation had listed this bucket as the place to go to. Well, turns out the data team made some changes and turned all new data to flow into a different place. I wasn’t cc’d on the email announcing this change so I was clueless. Once I changed my source to the new bucket, everything worked great.

So lesson learned: if you’re trying really hard and it’s not working, just stuff your ego and fears in the corner and go get some help.

Move Forward 

Once you’ve met with your people and they’ve told you what to try instead, go do that. But also really try to understand how they approached the problem. If you can recognize their method to coming to a solution, you can emulate it in the future. After you’ve solved the issue, review your roadmap and make any changes based on what you’ve learned from this experience.

Your Soon-to-Be Gandalf Responded!

(Check out the previous week’s letter if you don’t get the title AND to learn who to reach out to for mentorship and how to do it.)

Recap: You sent out a few emails last week to people in positions that you want to soon be in. This is what you do once they respond. But if none respond, move on and find some other people to email. You will strike gold at some point, I promise.

Read all the responses you’ve gotten and choose the best advice (it could be a mix of multiple as well). Go implement it. Then come back and thank them for their input, tell them that you tried it, that these are the results you got, and this is what you’re going to do next. For the person that you think had the best recommendation and want to get to know better, hit them with an additional “I really appreciate your advice, it was great, can I pick your brain a bit more about the project or industry in general over a cup of coffee or lunch?”

Now when they say yes, you can schedule a time to meet and this is where you’re going to really deepen your relationship. Continue to ask them specific questions and give them context on how you got here and your vision for where you want to go. You can also show the value you can provide to them as well, make it a two-way street. You don’t have to do this, most mentors are happy to take on a mentee just cause they like giving back and sharing their wisdom. But if you can give them something in return, it’ll just make the relationship stronger. And this value-add from your side doesn’t have to be anything large either.

Sticking with the mentor being in marketing, maybe they are thinking of expanding their marketing mix with tiktok and you have a tiktok account and kind of understand how best to make content for it versus other platforms. Boom, instant value that you can provide. So I love ending these kinds of meetings with a

And just like that, you’ve built a relationship with a mentor. Continue emailing them about what you’re doing and the results you’re seeing. Eventually, and I’ll remind you of this in Week 8’s letter, you’ll want to ask if they’re ok with doing monthly check-ins even after the internship ends.

HR Advice++

These are a few miscellaneous things that I’ve learned or struggled with at around the four week mark so take whatever applies to you.

Imposter syndrome

It’s really common to feel overwhelmed or think you don’t have what it takes to be here but that’s just your fear of uncertainty talking. I’ll give you the best piece of advice I’ve gotten on this:

This helped me shift perspectives from worrying about if my team thinks I’m good enough to believing that they do and there’s nothing I have to prove. Obviously I still had to do good work but internalizing this really stopped me from falling into negative spirals when I had small hiccups.

Ask a lot of questions

We take the systems and processes around us for granted a lot of the times. This is exactly why you should be asking “why” at least once a day. It’ll take you behind the scenes of how this environment you’re in came to be and there’s a lot you can learn from how something was built. You might even be able to suggest improvements once you understand it or use that logic when you’re building a similar system on your own.

Personal Branding

I can’t tell you how many meetings I’ve sat through where recruiters and higher-ups would go on for an hour about building your personal brand. I used to roll my eyes and put them in the background as I did something else. But now I realize that there’s definitely a lot of value to it, it’s just the way that program managers usually describe it that’s the issue.

To be perfectly honest, there’s a 99% chance you’re not going to make a real impact on anyone or build a brand so great that it’ll outlast the summer. But this also means that this is the perfect place to experiment with your communication, messaging, and how you come across.

So I say instead of your personal brand, focus more on observing how those with great personalities at your company interact with others. Try to start incorporating those things in how you go about your day. Test them out and work on the building blocks that you can then later use to build a great personal brand. And it’s ok if you make mistakes because again, very few people are probably going to remember you.

That’s it for week 4, make sure you ask for help if you need it and go get yourself a mentor! I’ll see you next week.

If these words have been useful to you or motivated you, go ahead and help your friends and fellow interns out as well by clicking the big button below!