How to deal with situation regarding internship project?
I am currently interning at a mid-sized tech company for the winter season. At the beginning of the internship, I was informed by the recruiter that the manager will assign the intern project at around week 2-3 of the program.
During the third week, I politely approached my manager regarding the intern project. The manager replied that the details of the project are still being finalized, as it involves a lot of dependencies across teams.
As of now (fifth week), the project has not yet been assigned. In the meantime, he has advised me to continue working on Jira tickets in my team's codebase.
I really enjoy my assigned tasks and definitely appreciate this opportunity to make contributions to a large codebase. However, I am a little concerned that I will not have sufficient time to finish the project or that my project's impact may not be significant enough. If I understand correctly, the project impact as well as timely completion are pretty significant factors towards intern return offer.
My question is: should I let my manager know about my concerns regarding the project, or would it be a better idea to wait until the manager assigns me the project?
Big thanks for reading through all of this - I know it is a very long post and I really appreciate your time!
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Discussion
(2 comments)- 0
7 days agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course HeroOof... Assuming a 12-week internship, starting your big intern project in Week 5/6 is pretty bad as almost half the internship is gone. At Meta, this would almost guarantee no return offer.
You should definitely let your manager know your concerns, but make sure that it doesn't come across purely as complaining. The main way to do this, which is a classic communication tactic, is to propose solutions. In your scenario, ask your manager if there's any initial parts of the project that have been de-risked that you can get a head start on. Ideally an entire project is scoped out before an intern is assigned to it, but there's no reason why you can't "build the plane as you're flying it". This is a common thing more senior engineers do, and by showing more advanced behaviors, you look better as an intern.
At the very least, just ask your manager what they have so far (Jira epics, project docs, wikis). Read through it and see if you can extract anything actionable. If you can, go above and beyond by proposing an alternate approach where there's less dependencies. It is very strange (and dangerous) for an intern to work on a project where there are many cross-team dependencies, and this is why most Meta interns worked on internal tools local to their specific team. Speaking of which, another option is to explore a hard pivot to see if there's a local internal tool like that which you can build instead.
The main tool you will need to convert a giant, ambiguous not fully-defined project into actionable coding items is decomposition. Go through the explainer here to learn more about it: "How do I make software less overwhelming?"
You can find more examples in the code quality course, which I also highly recommend for an intern: Break It Down
- 06 days agoTech Lead/Manager at Meta, Pinterest, Kosei
You should definitely bring up your concern to the manager. I like the way you're thinking about it already.
Lead off by mentioning how much you're enjoying the contributions to the large codebase and working with the team, but you'd also like the opportunity to ship something where you have a clear narrative and ownership.
Ask if there's anything you can do to help scope or refine the proposed project the manager has been working on. If you have ideas for a good project (look at what other interns are doing), you can even present them.
Framing the conversation this way will ensure you come across as responsible instead of needy.
