Midpoint review for internship

The midpoint review is just a check-in and either an encouragement/validation mechanism (if you're doing well) or a course mechanism mechanism (if you're doing well). It's very passive for you as the intern - You mostly just go in and listen. There is no self-review for you to write or formal score for you to maximize here. It's really just feedback.

The self review comes for the final review, but it's not that important for interns as they're closely looked after, primarily through their intern manager. This is in contrast to full-time engineers who are doing far more across a longer time span, especially more senior engineers (E5+). For these engineers, the self-review is necessary to get the full picture of what they did. This isn't the case for interns - Their destiny is computed from the intern manager review alongside the 1-3 peers. My Instagram intern had an extremely bad self-review (it pretty much violated all the advice in Taro 🤣), but he still got an "Exceeds Expectations" return offer.

The main thing you need to do is aggressively probe for feedback and do a good job sharing status updates on your projects, particularly in 1 on 1 meetings with your manager. Well-written diffs helps with self-documenting your journey as well. It's on my backlog to create a course dedicated to giving and receiving feedback, but in the meantime, check this out: This Is How You Get Feedback - Making The Process Smooth

One thing that's valuable to get a read on with the mid-point review is how you're trending:

Based on my performance so far, how am I trending in relation to the bar for a return offer at the end of my internship?

https://blog.jointaro.com/the-ultimate-software-engineer-internship-survival-guide/