I believe the first internship experience of a student plays a very vital role in defining the next years of his career. Having a great internship experience boosts your confidence to a level you never thought and thus gives you a push throughout your software journey.
There are few things that need to be heard or learned to have a great experience because at the end of the day it is all your perception, if you can somehow make it better you will automatically have a great experience.
Here I am going to share a few short general tips that I think students should keep in mind during their internship period. Mind you these are no way shortcuts to get a PPO these are some of those truths that have to be said out loud enough to be heard, so please take these gracefully.
- Expectations vs reality: Do not keep any pre expectations of how your internship is going to be or what projects you will get, most of the times I have seen students getting disappointed because they expected something and the reality did not meet that bar. There is nothing wrong in dreaming of getting that perfect project but such dreams only often come true so always keep an open mind.
- College vs Corporate: Students generally compare their college project experience with the professional work, believe me they are a lot different. There are lot of complexities and pre-coding work involved before you can ship out even a single block of code. There is a lot of process and discussion involved on every task unlike in college where you do as you wish.
- No work is big or small: Be open to whatever tasks are given to you and try to put your best effort in delivering it, no matter how small or big. Even if it is a small HTML CSS change or setting up an entire service from scratch embrace the beauty of both. Let it be a front end task or a backend task or a devops task or testing task learn to embrace everything, because only then you can give your best.
- Reading and writing: Learn to read and write documentations, it is one of the most underrated skills as a software engineer. You cannot expect everything to be straightforward served to you on a silver platter, you will have to go through tons of documentations to understand things sometimes. It is hard no one said that it would be easy, but give time and things will fall in place. The start is always the most challenging but as you get used to it starts getting easier.
- Patience Patience and Patience: It is the most important virtue as a software engineer, things take time and you have to accept that, you cannot learn an entire framework in a week, or understand a huge code base in a day, give time and keep patience, you will yourself realise that things become easy the more time you give to it. In todays instant gratification world it is hard to do this but there is no shortcut.
- Be outspoken: Do not expect people to come to you and give you the directions, sometimes you have to take the first step talk to your manager your mentor your peers to get the conversation rolling. Managers are busy, mentors are busy that does not mean you sit and wait, you have to take charge of your internships and make sure you get what you need.
- Communication: Forget guidance, no one can help you unless you ask for it so be vocal, if you have doubts ask them, if you need help seek them. No one but only you can help yourself. Keep in contact with other members of the team and seek out for help when needed. Sometimes even your peer interns can help you out, so keep discussing, keep communicating and you will get your answers. Don’t shut yourself out.
- Be humble and collaborate: You at times have to work with PMs, SDETs UX designers or others to get some tasks done, keep communicating and don’t think you know everything, everybody's opinions matters, everybody's time matter, learn to respect and be humble. Learning to collaborate and being humble is how you grow as a person.
- Don’t be a perfectionist: No one is perfect everyone needs help and guidance, the once who have mastered that code base base or that framework did not reach there by doing nothing, they have also faced the problems that you are facing so keep asking for help, keep clearing out your doubts, you will be there before you even know it. You do not have to know everything just enough to get your task done, learn when to start and when to stop.
- Clarity is key: Every task you get make sure that you understand each and everything perfectly, sometimes people don’t understand a few things but feel guilty to ask out loud, don’t be that, ask your heart out, at this stage, you are expected to ask questions. Don’t worry if anyone is judging it’s not your concern.
- Learning never hurts: Spend time to learn tools or frameworks if you are not familiar, you can ask for time to onboard or brush-up yourself on a new language or framework or tools, this is expected so don’t hesitate to ask time for studying.
- Be aware: Talk to your peer interns of how things are happening and about their team and work. Always keep yourself updated with what is going around, you never know sometimes it helps you in a way you never expected.
I hope these help you out is someway. I will try to add more such tips along the way.
Have a great internship !!