How to Do an Internship the Right Way (Part 3: Work Hard and Boldly)

Published in

Student Voices

6 min readDec 13, 2016

So you’ve locked down an internship for the next 4 to 12 months. Congratulations! That’s step 1.

READ Part 1: Impostor Syndrome
READ Part 2: Networking

This is the third in a series of posts about making the most out of your internship. I’ve had 3 internships so far as a University of Waterloo co-op student — my current one being at Boston-based Toast — and I have 3 more in the next 2 years. Through my experiences, I’ve managed to learn from my mistakes and improve both my effectiveness as an employee and myself as a person. I’ve assembled the lessons in this series partly for my own sake, but I hope you use them to make the most out of your experience, grow as a person, and return (if you want to) with a full-time offer locked down.

Hard work pays off

Hard work pays off. Cliche? Definitely. True? Of course. When you’re on an internship, you’re competing. You’re competing with your fellow interns, and you’re competing with those that came before and will come after you. You’re competing for a full-time job, for a glowing review at the end of your internship, or for a key referral down the road. You’re competing for people’s impressions of you as an employee. Person X at your company might not get to know you very well, but if they see how hard you work, they’re liable to bend over backwards to get you in for an interview at your dream company 6 years down the road. If all they saw was you slacking off and playing ping pong, there’s almost no chance they’ll help you. Hard work pays off. Sometimes you can’t see how or when, but it does.

Feeling overloaded?

Is work piling up for you? Are you feeling overloaded? Don’t begin to doubt yourself. If you answered “yes” to one or both of those questions, that’s actually a good sign. Most team leads won’t give you more work if they don’t think you can handle it. In your first few weeks, your work’s quantity and novelty can be stressful — you will likely struggle to complete tasks that you know other people find easy. That’s fine. It happens to every intern. You’ll get past it. As your workload grows, take it as an opportunity to learn how to prioritize and work hard. Outdo yourself and impress others, focusing your hard work in the right place and bringing tasks through to completion. Learn from each task you work on, whether successfully or not. Go home smarter every day.

That’s not my job!

At my current internship, I am a Payments and Credit Card Systems Engineer at Toast. The majority of my work is around web services. As a full-stack engineer, the backend side of me was satisfied, but the frontend side was not. There’s very little in the way of user interface on my team, and the UI that does exist is internal tooling that gets slapped together whatever way is easiest or fastest (okay, it’s not that bad, but the focus is on business value rather than user experience, so it’s a much different style of UI work). I decided that I wanted to branch out and get involved in frontend initiatives as well. As it turns out, Toast makes this really easy to do through some cross-team structures that exist already. I joined Toast’s “frontend guild” and started getting involved.

The “frontend guild” at Toast is a group of people from across multiple teams who are interested in being involved in anything that pertains to frontend development. This can be everything from code reviews to directional and strategy decisions for the organization. I’ve been involved in Angular2 vs. React discussions, and drove an initiative where I created a syntactical style guide that could be enforced through the Javsacript linter ESLint.

Getting involved in cross-team initiatives (whether driven by you or someone else) is valuable part of working hard and boldly. It shows the organization that you’re someone who both loves the company and loves to learn and get involved, and it helps to grow both the diversity and depth of your experience.

3 Challenges

I have three challenges for you. Three things I want you to do during your internship that will both challenge you and provide tremendous value. The second is something to do once (or a few times if you’re bold enough), and the first and third are things to do continuously.

Say “no” to Facebook.
Hold a meeting.
Update your resume.

Say “no” to Facebook

Can you do something for me? Don’t check Facebook at work. Really, not even once. I don’t just mean Facebook, I mean all social media. As an intern, you probably won’t be bringing your work life home with you, so don’t bring your personal life to work. It’s not easy to do, but it’s worth trying. Most time spent on social media is wasted time anyways, so waste your own time, not your employer’s. Need a break from work? Fine. Go find someone else who isn’t busy and socialize. Work hard: spend your non-work time at work socializing rather than on social media.

Hold a meeting

At some point during your internship, plan to hold an expensive meeting. Depending on your company’s organizational structure and size, this might be an all-hands (if you’re at a startup), team or project planning meeting, or a post-mortem. Holding a meeting isn’t easy, so why not learn how while you’re an intern? You will need to spend about as much time preparing for the meeting as the length of the meeting. Your first meeting will probably be a little bumpy of a ride, but if you plan and improvise well, it’s definitely possible to still have good outcomes. Work boldly: Spend others’ time on something valuable by holding a meeting.

Update your resume

Throughout your internship (and throughout your life, in fact) update your resume. This could mean having a continuous list of the major projects or achievements you’ve been a part of or metrics you’ve hit, updating your LinkedIn profile or actual resume, or doing anything that tracks and logs what you’ve spent your last 4+ months doing. If you wait until the end of the term to do these things, it’ll take you many times longer, and you’ll forget key metrics and your resume and LinkedIn profile will lack the precision they could have otherwise had.

You’re only going to have this job for 4–12 months, depending on the length of your internship. You’re not striving for a promotion or working to hold on to a job long-term, so it’s probably true that you could slack off and see only minor direct repercussions. However, the reality is that you’ll be missing out on opportunities to grow your technical and soft skills, build your resume effectively, expand your network, learn how to host a meeting, and countless other opportunities. That’s a huge tradeoff to make for laziness.

Don’t go home after the clock says you’ve worked 8 hours. Or 9. Or 10. Go home when you’ve accomplished what you wanted to accomplish that day, or go home after you’ve learned something. Spend each day working hard, and the occasional day working boldly.