A guide to evaluating internship opportunities
When you see or hear the word internship, how does it make you feel? Relaxed? Tense? Excited? Nervous?
I’ve always found the process of looking for an internship an incredibly anxiety-inducing experience. In my undergrad, I didn’t have the opportunity to participate in my school’s co-op program because my degree didn’t have the option available. I had to discover roles on my own, navigating the job market without much support from my faculty or student services. I even considered the dreaded unpaid internship because I felt I needed to get experience any way I possibly could.
This is a common trap when you’re just starting out: you think you need to accept any internship you’re offered, even if it’s unpaid. I’d like to propose that you have more control over your early career opportunities than you think you do. There is great privilege in being able to say no to an internship, but we can be more selective in the opportunities we choose to enhance our wellbeing and growth.
I’ll take you through a framework to help you identify the values that matter most to you when looking for a job, as well as the green flags and red flags you can look out for when assessing opportunities. I used this framework to evaluate my role at Loblaw Digital (LD) as a Design Research Intern, and it’s paid off: I’m now working as a Design Researcher on PC Express Fulfillment in a role that I love, doing work that I’m passionate about with a team that supports me. I want you to be able to find the same opportunity.
“I really enjoyed my time as a Design Research Co-op at Loblaw Digital. I gained valuable experience and never felt like ‘just a co-op’ because of the opportunity I was given to design and lead a study on my own. It was also exciting to be part of and contribute to a growing research practice. Most importantly, I was fully supported by an amazing manager and a great team.”
- Alyssa King, former Design Research Coop at Loblaw Digital
Note: This article will include a mix of personal examples from my own internship experiences working as a Design Researcher in the technology space, examples from a few of LD’s past Design Research coops (shoutout to Alyssa and Rhiannon), as well as some hypothetical examples.
What Are Your Values?
“What do you value in a job?” This might feel like a hard question to answer, and that’s because it is — it takes time and experience to figure out what you do and do not value.
I’ve asked myself this question in the past and I swear I looked like a deer in headlights.
“In a few short months, I found a career I loved, developed skills to succeed, and formed friendships with people who to this day still inspire me. I will forever be grateful for the support and opportunities provided by the team. I was given the space to try new things, to take risks, and to fail. All while being guided by mentors who were passionate about their work. Through this, I grew as a Design Researcher and as a person.”
- Rhiannon Milne, former Design Research Coop at Loblaw Digital
There are a few approaches you can take to determine the values that matter most to you in a job:
- If you’ve already had internship experience, you can think back to those roles.
- If you haven’t had an internship yet, you can think of your ideal role/job and what would matter most to you.
- You can use a combination of both.
I’d recommend completing the activities in order because they build upon each other, but feel free to skip ahead if you find yourself getting stuck. You can also work through the activities alone or in a small group with a few friends or colleagues. If you decide to work through the activities with others, just make sure that you feel safe sharing. Alyssa, Rhiannon, and I tested out these activities as a group and set aside some time after each activity to discuss what we documented. It felt a bit like a therapy session 😅.
“I loved it and I felt empowered as an early-career UXR. I think it’s going to help a lot of newer UXRs since it’s so hard to break into the field.”
– Alyssa King, Former Design Research Coop at Loblaw Digital
“This is an activity that I feel I can use throughout my career when job hunting, not just for internships. 😊”
– Rhiannon Milne, Former Design Research Coop at Loblaw Digital
Activity #1: Identifying Your Feelings
As a first step towards identifying your values, you’re going to reflect on your feelings. Using the sticky note feature in Miro, document the emotions you felt in each of the roles you’ve held (one emotion per sticky note). If you find articulating or identifying your feelings challenging, you can use this list of emotions to help you work through the activity.
When you’re ready, head on over to Activity #1: Identifying Your Feelings Miro board.
Activity #2: Identifying Your Red and Green Flags
A red flag represents experiences that make you say, “oh no…” or “this doesn’t feel right.” It’s a warning telling you to move forward with caution or to pursue other opportunities. A green flag gives you a sense that the role/company is right for you. Red flags and green flags will vary from person to person so a red flag for me might not be a red flag for you.
🤔 Food for thought: what role does intuition play in your job search journey? Have you trusted your intuition in the past? Daniel Kahneman’s advice is to delay your intuition (not ignore it) when making a formal decision such as whether to accept a job offer. By leading with intuition, you no longer take in information and risk jumping to a decision too early, but by following with intuition, it can become your “best guide”. Author and organizational psychologist Adam Grant also suggests making your intuition explicit early on so that you can challenge and test it.
To identify these red and green flags, let’s take a trip down memory lane and think about the projects, people, and experiences that contributed to the emotions that you felt. If you didn’t accept the job or are currently in the interview process, you can think about some of the red and green flags that came up in the interview.
Throughout the activity, ask yourself “why did I feel this way?” I find asking myself this question helps me pinpoint the exact interaction or experience that made me feel good or bad.
I’ve included some examples of green and red flags below. Again, just a reminder that a red flag for you might not be a red flag for someone else. And in some cases, you might come across false positives and negatives during your job search.
If you’re currently in the middle of an internship, I’d encourage you to start documenting your feelings and identifying those red and green flags. This will make it easier for you to evaluate your next opportunity when it’s time to start looking.
Head on over to Activity #2: Identifying Your Green and Red Flags Miro board to work through the activity.
Activity #3: Identifying Your Values
Once you’ve documented your red and green flags, you can leverage them to identify your values. It might be helpful to synthesize your flags into themes (like a true User Researcher).
Here’s an example of what your red and green flag synthesis could look like and the corresponding values they might ladder up to:
You might find that not all your flags ladder up into a value and that’s okay — feel free to add those flags to the parking lot section of the Miro board (shown above). You might also have a value that isn’t represented by any green and red flags. If that’s the case, you can write out what you value and identify those green and red flags later.
When you’re ready, head on over to Activity #3: Identifying Your Values.
Activity #4: Bringing It All Together
Now you might be wondering — “what do I do next? How do I assess whether my next opportunity aligns with my values?” I’m going to be honest with you: this part is tricky. Leverage your inquiry and observation skills to help you out.
We are going to expand on the framework to create a tool kit that includes questions you can ask and things you can observe. As User Researchers we cannot just rely on what people say, we need to triangulate what they say with what they do — observing behavior is equally, if not more, important.
A quick story on observing behaviour: A couple years back I was being interviewed by two people for a Design Research role. Let’s call my interviewers Sammy and Susan who were both in leadership roles at the company. The interview was going really well — I felt like it would be a good fit, but something was a little off. Any time I asked a question, Sammy would begin speaking and Susan would quickly talk over them. Not once did Susan apologize for the rude interruption. It was an interesting situation because Susan was really trying to sell the fact that they value diverse perspectives and experiences, but she wouldn’t even let her colleague share their own thoughts in response to my question. What this showed to me is that their words and actions were not aligned — a huge red flag for me.
Head on over to Activity #4: Bringing it All Together when you’re ready.
Using touchpoints to assess your next opportunity
One caveat to this approach is that you might have very few touchpoints prior to accepting a role. Personally, I’ve gone through interview processes that had anywhere from 1 to 3 rounds. Some interviews are 30 minutes in length while others are an hour. There are different formats too — sometimes you’re chatting with the HR team, other times you’re presenting a case study to a hiring manager. Regardless of the format or length, you can treat every touchpoint with your potential team as an opportunity to determine value alignment, and those green and red flags.
Ask yourself: Aside from the interview, what other touchpoints can I create for myself or access to learn about the company/role?
- Reach out to an employee who works or previously worked at the company to learn about their experience (can be full-time employee or a past intern)
- Attend company events and pay close attention to how people talk about their work, their teammates, and their own values
Final Thoughts
Now that you’ve worked through the activities, I’d like to leave you with a few final thoughts:
- It’s a living document. I’ve designed this framework to be revisited from time to time and I’d encourage you to treat it as a living document. I’d recommend revisiting it when you’re: 1) Looking for a new role. So that you can actively keep the values you identified in mind and be vigilant about those red and green flags. 2) While you’re in the internship. It’s a lot easier to document your emotions and red and green flags as they arise instead of thinking back after the fact.
- Values can change. Expect and anticipate that your values will change over time — some are rigid, and others are fluid. Another reason to revisit this framework 😉
- Iterate on your question and observation tool kit to make it better. Asking good questions and observing the right things will require some trial and error — test out the questions you developed in activity #4 and practice your observation skills every time you engage with a potential team or company. Adjust the questions you ask and things you observe if they aren’t effective at uncovering value alignment.
- Every job opportunity will have positives and negatives. It would be unrealistic to think that there’s a job out there that will be sunshine and rainbows 100% of the time. There are ups and downs in any role and that’s okay. What you don’t want is for the negative experiences to completely outweigh the positive ones.
I’d like to extend a special thank you to Alyssa King and Rhiannon Milne, two of LD’s past Design Research Coops, for testing out the workshop activities and sharing their work experiences with me to make this article even better. ❤️
And of course, a big thank you to Tammy Crawford, Michelle Robb, Liam Thurston, and the entire Human Research team for providing feedback on this article and for being an incredible support system throughout my internship at LD. Special thanks to Tammy Sutherland for editing this blog post.
If you have any questions about the framework, thoughts on ways to make it better, or ever want to chat about Design Research, feel free to reach out to me!
~ Best of luck to those who are looking for their first or next role. I hope this helps 😊
Emily,
Design Researcher, PC Express Fulfillment
