3 important things you must do at the start of your next internship.

Three key lessons I learned after my first two weeks of interning in Singapore. I wish I knew those before.

Hey past, current, or future Interns,

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Awesome! Let’s get started with the 3 lessons I learned from my first two weeks of working as an innovation consultant in Singapore.

Lesson 1: Try to understand the project as good as you possibly can.

If you start your internship and join an active project right from the beginning, you NEED context information. If you start working on tasks without understanding the project, you will get lost and ask yourself why you are doing what you are doing all the time.

Either your supervisor will tell you about the project, or you have to read through some onboarding slides. In either case, you must understand the information you receive.

Let's say your supervisor onboards you in a meeting. Before starting, you must have something to take notes on. It does not matter how, but you save time if you take the notes digitally.
Once the meeting starts, don’t try to write down all the information, but try to listen closely. Make sure you understand:

1. What does your client do? Meaning what industry they are from, what products they sell; basically what the surrounding context of the project is.

2. What the key issue, problem, or task at the given moment is, and what it was in the beginning? These things might change over time and it is important to see where the project was coming from and where it is currently.

3. Who is responsible for which tasks? Makes it easier to find the right people later on.

4. Where to find past data and how the file system of the company works. This will save you a lot of time looking for the right things.

5. What your tasks for the next few days are going to be? Try to get them to be as specific as possible. This will make getting started for you much easier.

That is quite a lot of things, and none of them were clear for me after the first onboarding meetings. It took almost 10 days before I was finally able to understand parts of the project.

This is what brings me to the next lesson.

Lesson 2: Slow them down and ask if they can repeat or clarify.

If I had done this in the beginning, I would have saved a lot of time and stress. This means for you to take the 5 questions from above into the onboarding meetings, and ask them over and over again until you understand them.

You might think that your supervisor will get annoyed if you ask clarification questions all the time, but it is good practice to let them know before the meeting starts, that you will ask some more clarification questions now, to save them and yourself important time in the coming weeks.

Lesson 3: At the end of each day, take some time to write down your tasks clearly.

This is related to the idea of SMART Goals. Try to be as clear and specific as possible with anything that you set out to do in the future. If you write down some vague todo like “finish the mockups” you will have two problems: (1) You will have a hard time getting started. (2) You will have a hard time stopping.

It will be hard to get started because you don’t know what the next mockup to work on is going to be and when to start with it. You might get a feeling of overwhelm and procrastinate with other things.
It will be hard to stop work because you don’t set a clear deadline by which point in time, or at which the number of designs you will stop work. Parkinson’s Law states that you will always work as long as you allow yourself to.

Therefore,

1. Break down tasks into smaller tasks, and clearly state on your to-do list which subtask you will start with. Write “Start with the dog mockup after the morning meeting,” and “after dog mockup continue with cat mockup.”

2. Set a deadline by which you for sure stop work. Communicate this deadline clearly with your supervisor, if they tend to keep working hours at night rather loose.

This exercise has one more benefit that ties back to what I just mentioned. Trying to write down todos precisely, tests whether you understood the project and the problem you are trying to solve. If you find it difficult to specify the tasks you have to do, go back to your supervisor and ask them to clarify.

If you made it this far, congrats and big thanks from my side. I really appreciate that you took the time to read this. The following article is waiting for you next Sunday OR in case you shared my newsletter with your friends and family, the checklist will be straight with you by Thursday.

Wish you an awesome week ahead, and if you have the chance to apply the things you learned, do it!

Cheers,

Jan