All Engines Go!

This and the 9th week of my internships have always been the most frantic. I’m heads-down building for hours on end to complete my project in time, running around asking people for feedback and any last minute changes, and rubbing my fingerprints off typing out documentation that I neglected (which shouldn’t be the case for you if you followed through on previous weeks’ advice!).

Therefore, I’m going to keep this week’s letter pretty short and just give you a checklist of things to have done before the week is up. Next week is going to be all about creating an incredible final presentation so stay tuned!

Getting to “I’m Done!”

• Completed your project and evaluated how it has met the deliverables goals and KPIs that you set.

• Your project in a place that is accessible with appropriate organization and a dictionary that explains the place and function of each document.

  • If you’re in tech, this is most likely going to be some version of Git. Make sure you clean up your branches and have good comments in all your files. Here’s some more tips on making a great repo.

  • If you’re in marketing or design, this could be Adobe, Canva, Figma, etc and I think it’s even more important here to have good indexing so your team can find stuff.

• Project documentation and handover material in SharePoint and Jira-esque platforms.

  • This is a fantastic article of the things to include in your handoff report.

• Set up a knowledge transfer session for next week so you can walk your mentor or manager over everything you’ve done and how they can continue it.

• If you finish early, start working on next steps for your project to be productionalized or implemented in the team’s workflow. This’ll show that you’re thinking beyond the internship and definitely set you apart.

I also just wanted to say that it’s totally fine if you aren’t able to wrap everything up at the end of this week, I was literally making changes to my code till the last day on my last internship cause my models randomly broke. Try your hardest to finish up this week so you can enjoy your last week but scope changes and technical difficulties are completely understandable so don’t beat yourself up if they happen.

Sealing The Deal with Your Mentor

If you’ve been here since week 4 and got yourself a mentor outside of the one from your team, congrats(!), now is the time to transition that relationship beyond the internship.

Reach out to them about having finished your project and tell them all the awesome things you accomplished and how you appreciated their help and advice over the past few weeks. Give them an invite to your final intern presentations as well.

Now you’re going to want to ask them if they’re ok with continuing this relationship beyond the internship and having monthly one-on-ones where you talk about anything y’all are working on and things going on in the industry.

They’ll most likely say yes if you’ve gotten to this point but if they’re apprehensive because they’ve never been a mentor, let them know that it’s very low stakes and you’re just going to be conversations similar to the ones you’ve had so far.

That’s it for week 8. Get out there tomorrow and finish out your project, I’m rooting you on! I’ll see you next week with some awesome presentation tips.

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