Hey folks, welcome back to my weekly newsletter.
This week's edition is about how to approach an internship and walk out of it with a job.
A few weeks ago, just before our UG batch left for their summer internships, one of them asked me a question: “What do I do in there to convert this into a full-time offer?”
It is a fair question and there’s no answer that guarantees this, but I’ll try my best to explain how to approach this to maximise your odds.
The first thing to remember is that you’re going in as an intern and in most cases the company is not planning to hire you full time.
You are there for a few weeks, you will leave, and to most of the people around you, you are a resume in progress.
So they give you small, safe, low-stakes work because they know you’re temporary.
The ones who convert climb out of that box before the internship is over.
So when that student asked me how, here is what I told them.
Most internships have empty patches, especially early, when your manager is too busy to think about you.
Most people waste it waiting to be useful.
Instead try to understand who owns what, what the team is worried about this quarter, where things get stuck.
You cannot solve a problem you do not understand yet, and these weeks are when you learn what the real problems even are.
Genuinely talk to people, across teams, beyond your manager.
Have lunch with them, ask what they are working on, be curious about it.
The best problem you can solve as an intern is usually one you stumble across because someone two desks away mentioned, offhand, that a thing they do every week is painful and manual.
Plus those friends you make also have context on what your manager is struggling with.
This is the one I see interns get wrong most often.
A manager hands you data entry, or notes from a meeting, or a deck to format, and somewhere inside you think this is beneath me, I am sharper than this.
So you do it half-heartedly or you push back.
You want more important “strategic” work but what you are signalling is entitlement, and a manager can feel that instantly.
The same goes for the small stuff.
Saying no to work because it came in slightly after hours, or because it was not technically your task, comes across very differently when you are an intern than when you are a tenured employee who has earned that right.
Even the non-task related signals add up here, including how you dress daily, because all of it feeds the same question in a manager's head: does this person take the place seriously.
After this, feel free to solve something nobody asked you to.
This creates confidence that you have intent beyond just a resume work experience pointer.
But the most important things:
First, on asking for the offer.
You cannot really ask for a PPO until you have earned the right to, and you will know when that is because you will have done something undeniable.
If you ask before that, it can come across as entitlement.
In most cases when you’ve done good work, you won’t even have to ask as it’ll come from them directly.
What you can do is get a pulse check.
Second, none of this works if you are doing it to be seen doing it.
People can tell the difference between someone genuinely trying to make something better and someone performing for a reference.
The internship is not a few weeks of proving you can follow instructions but a narrow window to make yourself someone the team cannot quite imagine going back to working without.
Spend it climbing out of the box.
Hit reply: if you have interned somewhere, what is the one thing you did that you think changed how they saw you?
I read every email.
Swati