Joining an Internship is Like Being Born Again
A Guide to a Great Internship for Developers and Designers
There comes a time in everyone’s life when you realize that it’s just a time to start a new exciting journey. It doesn’t matter if you have just completed your dream studies, decided to change the course of your career path or just wanted to follow your heart. One thing is sure — diving into a new specialization is a huge chunk of knowledge to assimilate. This post will be about assimilation itself.
Internships are often perceived as slavery. Moreover, it is said that interns work for free and learn nothing from that — what means months of doing boring stuff and losing valuable time. Nothing could be further from the truth! An internship is the time when employers invest their time and money to prepare you for your future work. Therefore, they want to do their best, because who wants to spend money on training a coffee boy?
It usually lasts around three months. That means 60 working days which you spend learning new stuff, meeting new people and going deep into their environment. It’s time to learn all kind of behaviours, rules and guidelines, from solving easiest issues with a project to politely disagreeing with client’s opinion about the project. During this period, you won’t be assessed based on the profit that you can provide to the company, but on the progress that you are able to do each day. Let me take you through some of the key things that I considered valuable over two years after completing my own internship at EL Passion.
Choose Wisely
These days there is a massive competition in the job market. That means a huge advantage for future interns, as they have many valuable companies to choose from. When choosing between several offers, do not pay attention to (as you can guess) money but ask about the experience that you will gain during the internship, about a program of trainee development and whether the company plans to hire after successfully completed internship.
Only Diamond Can Cut Diamond
You can learn from many resources of knowledge like books, podcasts or video tutorials, but there is no better source than skilled and experienced colleague sitting beside you. Watch, ask, recreate — repeat. If you can join any project carried out in your department, do it even for one day. Watch how they are planning the work, check what tools are they using or what is their schedule for a single day. Ask about books, articles and practical pieces of advice. One day it may save your skin.
Try Hard
Some people say that patience is the key. Not really. Not if you have a limited time to learn and succeed. Set your goals for each week and force yourself to complete them, even if it will cost you some effort. Josh Kaufman came up with a theory that you need only 20 hours to learn a new skill on a decent level.
So basically, you need to deconstruct your specialisation into few smaller parts and learn basics from each of them. Learn enough theory to be able to notice mistakes and self-correct when practicing. Than make sure you have a space where you can focus and study for at least 20 hours. This will grant you really great results in a short time, just follow these four rules:
- Deconstruct the skill
- Learn enough to self-correct
- Remove practice barriers
- Practice at least 20 hours
So as you can see, learning basics from every part of your specialisation will grant you huge results. However you need to keep being stick to these rules which will help you to progress in decent time.
Learn Foreign Language
Ability to communicate in English is a common thing these days, but language skills limited to having a small talk with your new colleagues are not enough. There is nothing worse than good project or idea failing due to lack of arguments when a client cannot understand your point of view. But you can prevent that by learning phrases relevant to your specialisation. If you can’t afford private lessons then watch presentations and read articles from your industry.
Beg For Feedback
Receiving feedback is sometimes hard, but it can be constructive and will give wind to your sails if given in a right way. Giving and receiving feedback from your team is an essential to improve your skills, and during the internship, it should be done at least once a month.
“Feedback is the breakfast of champions.” — Ken Blanchard
Giving feedback properly is hard too. You can help your colleagues by giving them some tips before your feedback meeting. Ask them to prepare notes before your meetings, they won’t be able to remember everything by heart, and you do not want them to forget about some kind compliment, do you? Ask about some specific project that you participated in lately, about your strong points and first of all about the weak ones because on those you have to focus and work for few next weeks.
Be Self-Aware
This could this could be extremely difficult but also the most rewarding point at the same time. People mostly call this confidence, but I rather prefer to think about it as about being aware of yourself. If you want to progress evenly and efficiently, you need to know everything about your advantages and disadvantages to grind them in a proper way. The primary source of this knowledge will be the above mentioned feedback but also your experience from previous company or studies. If somebody told you that you are good at something, identify yourself with it because maybe it will become your merit. If you are tending to postpone things for the next day, it is your time to work on that and keep things done the same day. This will provide you a true self confidence which will not let you fall down in a difficult time.
Share Your Knowledge
You may think that sharing knowledge when being on internship is impossible, but if you have reached this point that means you are a patient student! So obviously you will pass your internship and spread the wings as a junior. Then it would be great to share some knowledge, huh? Prepare presentation for your department in the field that you are good at, surprise them with some technology news that you can explain in depth or… write an article with few tips and adventures from your own internship ;)
As you may have noticed, I have used word “Learn” over ten times. It’s the biggest clue and should be treated as a synonym of the internship. I wish you good luck and will keep my fingers crossed for your internships!
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