My first corporate job was a disaster. It wasn’t a job job though. It was a 2-month internship.
The internship was amazing on paper. Great brand, great role. And a bunch of seniors from my college who were going to buddy me through the labyrinth the place was. The works.
It just didn’t start off well.
“Who is your project guide?” Asked my buddy and then gave a wan smile when I mentioned the name. Some giggles exchanged between the bunch of colleagues, those insider jokes that are more than just jokes, indicating that something was off with the person being discussed.
I was too intimidated to figure out what the gossip being exchanged in sly winks was all about. But, it set the tone for what I thought of my project guide.
The myriad possibilities.
Perhaps (s)he is unapproachable? Doesn’t like interns? Not helpful? Fighter cock? Rude?
I had a mental model for the person already before I met them. The details are now fuzzy on whether they actually turned out that way or whether I projected a lot of my imagination on them.
That’s that. You can imagine how my internship went. Nowhere.
But, I do have pearls of wisdom, not only from my own experience but also from having managed interns later in life. So here goes, in no particular order.
Ask for time to understand the project and the outcomes for the company better. Be at it. Have an agenda and use the time effectively. Assume that intern managers will eventually give you time if you keep following up and will approve recurring requests for time too, if you used the time effectively first time around.
Engage informally with folks across the company. Have tea with them, lunch with them. Don’t hang out just with the interns who are as clueless as you. Many a context becomes clearer over a cup of tea than a slot in the meeting room.
Solicit regular feedback, ideally weekly. Don’t shy away from bad feedback, you asked for it. Use the feedback to improve, get better. You have limited time to prove yourself, to yourself as much as to others. And this is as good a way as any other to get there.
Remember, nothing in life comes on a platter, and an internship might be the best place to get some practice with that fundamental.
I know, I know. The onus is not all on the intern. The intern managers have a part to play too. Who almost always have no time, saddled with the here and the now, perennially.
We, the employees of the corporate world, are attuned to productivity, tasks with immediate gratification, results that are simply next steps. Long term investments of time and energy, with a probability, not a certainty of success, isn’t for many of us.
And internships are up top in that list of investments without clarity of returns.
But, perhaps, there are lessons to learn. In engaging, mentoring and coaching young minds, more and more of which category we will end up working with as we grow older.
Seeing the world through the eyes of the intern, understanding their motivations and fears, their thought processes and priorities, might actually be beneficial to our own sustainability and relevance in this world.
And that’s a long game worth playing, isn’t it?
P. S. Views strictly personal. None of the events mentioned in this post refer to the organisation that I am currently associated with.