Hey everyone! 👋 In this article, I have written about her Amazon Intern experience and answered a few questions:
• What do interns do?
• How do teams work together?
• What challenges do interns face?
Please remember to like this article! 🙌 If you have any questions or suggestions, let me know in the comments below.
so Lucy said in her video given details about this topic.
she said "before joining amazon web services as an intern I remember spending hours watching a day the live videos on
youtube trying to picture what it would be like working in a large tech company
these videos got me excited and although I probably wasn't making the most out of my time watching everybody's morning routine and free work lunches it motivated me to stay resilient and not give up after every interview rejection.
there were a few things though that I wish these videos covered
I wanted to know more about
what interns get to work on, how teams communicate and solve problems together, and what challenges interns face during their short time in the company. "
if you're new here my name is Ankit and I write all about tech
career and student advice today I wanted to write a bit about lucy's experiences with amazon web services and answer these three questions so if you're interested in reading more articles regarding experiences comment below
let's continue;
she said " let's get into it it's nine o'clock in the morning now and at 10 o'clock I have a meeting with my manager and a few of the consulting interns to go through the different projects that we have over the summer and figure out which one we want to do
so we can do them either in pairs or in small groups or even individually and we can choose between quite a few technical and non-technical projects so I thought I'd take this time to talk a bit about what interns do in internships aside from everything you see in the typical day in the live videos you know apart from that coffee catch-up and virtual intern events.
I guess what you do as an intern varies from company to company and depends on the length of your internship so a month-long internship could look very different from a six month long
internship and for example when I was at Deloitte last summer my internship was for four weeks and this involved a lot of shadowing
getting to know the team and I wasn't specifically placed on a project to work on just because there wasn't enough time
for you to make much of an impact it was more about learning about the company learning about the team.
and see if you like the company and see if the company likes you, on the other hand, during my internship with AWS I was interning for six months in one team, and with that, I was able to take ownership of three projects.
and seeing the end to end was a really good experience because
especially with a longer internship you're not only able to be immersed in the company culture but you're able to make a real tangible impact on the team that you're assigned to as well and I think that that is super valuable as an intern especially when you get the chance to see what you like and you don't like in the company to see if that company is right for you so in terms of a typical day though it depends as well because um it comes down to what you want to gain out of the internship.
I think sometimes if you just want to kind of um like have fun and see how things go not set any goals kind of like do the bare minimum to get buyers and in turn, your day might look quite empty because if you just go to the required meetings and kind of like do what you're told to do um that would be fine as you would still be able to continue with your internship and learn a few things
but if you want to stand out as an intern and potentially land a full-time role after your internship I think it's really important for you to be able to set measurable goals and be proactive about your learning so that by the end of the internship when you reflect you can see that even though you were just an intern you
were able to contribute to the team that you're in and also be able to have like a graduate position at the end where you're able to come back to if you're interested in staying with the company.
so I guess the main takeaway is that no two internships are the same some of them you might be working on multiple projects some of them you might be doing more shadowing and more learning so it's really up to you to make the most out of every opportunity
that you're offered okay so it's 12 now and I'm gonna take a
bit of a break from using my standing desk after lunch, I'm gonna be sitting here and I typically try and alternate between using the two just to make sure that I'm not sitting at the same place um the entire day and getting a lot of back pain, okay so I just had lunch and now I wanted to talk a bit about how teams
communicate and collaborate.
so I guess it depends on the company and the team that you're in um and even with amazon as well in such a big company different teams have different ways of doing things and from my experience I think what I saw was quite common is having stand-ups, especially during a virtual setting having a daily stand-up or A weekly stand-up can help keep everyone on the team is accountable especially during interns with interns as well sometimes you might not understand half the things that are being discussed in the team stand-ups because you're working on your project.
but it's a really good way to see how everything fits in together in a company which is pretty cool and at amazon and quite a few different companies as well I think there's like really helpful
collaboration software so um in amazon we use amazon chime so there's like a video conferencing software for us to connect virtually um and in different companies, it might be zoom or google me things like that and there are also different ways of collaborating as well in terms of using shared drives collaboration folders and I guess another thing that we have and um different companies have different ways of doing this is sort of how we brainstorm different ideas and how we can turn ideas into reality.
so we have something called narratives and also things called like prfaqs and these are ways for us to kind of like um generate an idea and to be able to elaborate and expand on it get people's feedback and I guess the main takeaway for interns or people who are going into an internship is that at the start you might be quite overwhelmed with the different tools the different ways of doing things in a company especially if you haven't seen it being done in any other sort of the role that you were in before
so don't be afraid to ask questions um ask what sort of norms there are in certain teams like if you have a stand-up that you have to go to every single week or if you have like a team social event that is optional for you to attend things like that just making sure and clarifying what are the ways that different teams communicate and work together, especially in a virtual setting you might end up missing out on certain things if you don't ask the right questions about it.
okay so it's around 5 30 now and I wanted to talk a bit about the challenges that you face as an intern, so I just finished work um done for the day and this is kind of the last part I wanted to discuss with this video and this part is something I think is quite important because there's a big emphasis on getting that first internship there's a big emphasis on how to do well how to succeed the benefits of internships but not too much is discussed on what challenges interns face and more importantly how to avoid these challenges in the first place and if you do find yourself
having this challenge how you can kind of work around it
so when I was doing some planning last night for the video I sort of came up with a list of things that I found challenging as an intern and depending on people's personalities
everyone sort of gets a different set of challenges that they might face I think for me specifically some of the big ones on the board were fear of uncertainty feeling overwhelmed by the amount of information I don't know and the amount of information that I need to know not sure if I'm doing well connecting with the team feeling like it's an extended interview.
I try not to think like that but sometimes you feel like you're being kind of assessed during the process so I wanted to kind of talk a bit about that and how you can sort of overcoming these challenges if you face these yourself okay so the first the challenge I wanted to talk about is the fear of uncertainty how you can overcome that when things are just out of your control sometimes you don't know a lot of new terms and it's kind of impossible to pick up everything at once.
I think first of all recognize that you're not going to know everything in the first few days and second of all try your best to make sure that you can cover a lot of things quickly that you're uncertain about giving yourself more of a peace of mind so I think for amazon what we normally get is like an onboarding plan
so it's something that links a lot of resources together to make sure that we're able to quickly figure out different processes.
in the company learn about the culture learn about what
we kind of need our role so I think doing that helps to try to
make sure that you utilize the resources that you're given so that you can help yourself limit that anxiety and uncertainty that you face and I think also just recognizing that not everything is going to be on paper so asking a lot of questions when you're uncertain about something helps.
I think people especially when you're in turn people are always willing to help and that's something that I have appreciated throughout my internship journey and has helped me a lot with this fear of uncertainty one more thing you can do is to find a mentor whether that be within the company or outside the company sometimes you're assigned to one but I think sometimes it's okay if you want to proactively Search for a mentor that's not necessarily in your current team.
I think just having someone who can trust someone you can sort of relies on when there are questions that you want to ask or if there's any advice that you want to seek helps remove that uncertainty as well the second challenge that I faced was connecting with people in my team and outside of my team.
I think in my previous internships I've always taken a bit longer than the other interns to bond with people in the team that I was in but working from home made it a lot worse because people talk less about their life their hobbies the career aspirations things like that when they're not in the office when they're on a virtual time core um working from home mainly as a new intern it's kind of hard to break the ice initially.
it's so it's something that you have to consciously try and do so what I recommend doing is making the effort to get to know everyone in your team so when you first join set up half an hour course with people in your team and make sure that you specify that it's specifically just to try and get to know each other and to maybe for you to learn a bit about what they do their role.
but you know specifically to sort of like get to know them as a person as well so that way you can break the ice early on to avoid those initial like awkward conversations that you have and Make sure that you have a more enjoyable experience working from home because connecting with people is quite important I think as an intern when you can get all your work done go above and beyond make an impact on your team.
it's as good as that is it's very important to be able to integrate well with the team and trust them and get to
know people as who they are outside of work as well the third and final challenge that I'm going to talk about today is sometimes feeling like your internship is like an interview.
I've heard this phrase a lot from people in the past and I think it's coming from good intentions because they want you to kind of keep it in the back of your mind that you're kind of being assessed your performance is being assessed so that in the end you can receive a return offer but I think it's quite an unhealthy mindset.
sometimes it can get quite unhealthy especially if you're an overthinker you can't just kind of fixate on that long-term end goal and not be able to kind of focus on other things and it does sound a bit quite extreme but overthinkers will kind of know what I mean by this but I think what helped me overcome this challenge and I was really lucky to be able to change my mindset and overcome this challenge within the first two months of the internship.
it was to focus less on myself um what the company can bring to me but instead, focus more on especially since I was an intern for six months what I can offer to my team and what value I can bring to the company so with that in mind, I was focused more on how I can make my manager's day easier things like what help I can offer to others outside my team and how to be more involved as an intern just to have some more fun throughout my internship experience. "
so with that, I was able to overcome that or like everything is an interview sort of mindset and I would recommend doing the same trying to figure out what value you can bring to the company this wraps up my article hopefully, in this article you were able to learn more about what interns do.
how teams communicate and collaborate to solve problems and what challenges interns might face working from home if you enjoyed this article please give it a like and share your thoughts down below Fallow if you want to see more tech student or career-related advice articles.
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