Internship Advice

If you’re going into your first internship this summer, here is some advice for things I only realized after my first or second internship:

Communication:

  1. If you unsuccessfully spend over 1 hour trying to figure something out, ask a mentor for some guidance and mention what you have attempted. It’s not embarrassing to ask for help :)
  2. Have 1:1’s, ask for feedback directly, and honestly tell your mentor what you want to gain/improve on.
  3. If you are not learning something new and are not interested in your project, let your mentor/manager know! Your team wants you to have a great learning experience!
  4. Schedule informal chats with people in the company that you find interesting. Full time employees want to inspire and talk to interns about their careers.

Technical:

  1. At the start of your internship, ask a mentor for a high level overview of your project’s architecture.
  2. Keep pull requests small and focused on a modular feature/sub-feature you’re implementing.
  3. Review your pull request yourself first before submitting to catch minor style and code errors (i.e. no print statements, debugging statements, etc.)
  4. Embrace code reviews and don’t be intimidated if you end up with a lot of comments. You learn a lot about writing clean code from these. My first code review left me with like > 30 comments.
  5. Don’t be afraid to change code for fear of breaking something. You can always undo it with Git.

Return Offers:

  • Universities often have an agreement with companies for a minimum of X weeks before the intern has to sign their return offer from an internship
    • For UCLA: [Source]
      • Return internship offers are given only 2 weeks from internship end date to sign the offer letter
      • Return full time offers are given until Nov. 1st to sign the offer
  • Companies will often give you the smallest amount of time to decide if you want to return based on your school’s policy!
  • If you want to try out a different company, you should start applying/interviewing ahead of time (for UCLA students around late August/early September) so that you do not have to renege (break your signed contract) on your company. Reneging is usually seen as pretty bad and is a last choice scenario. So keep this timeline in mind if you are considering working for a different company to avoid adding more stress onto recruitment season.