I recently mentored an intern at my company and came away from the experience with a few key takeaways. This isn’t an exhaustive guide, just some of my thoughts atm.

An internship is an extended interview. Even if it feels laid back, you’re still being consciously and subconsciously evaluated. You have just a few weeks to make a killer impression to advocate for a return offer.

Make the most of your time

Most summer internships are only 8-12 weeks. During this short time, you’ll have new employee onboarding, intern events, ramping up on your team / project, team events, and your final presentation. This means you could have as few as 5 weeks to work on your actual project. You need to make them count.

Impress many levels of people

Once your internship is over, the company will decide whether to extend you a full-time offer. This will likely require green-lights from many different people - your mentor, manager, hiring manager, and possibly a bar-raiser. This means that not only do you need to impress the people directly seeing your work, you may also need your project to look impressive on paper for other uninvolved decision makers.

Given that you have so little time to impress so many levels of people, you need to give your internship your all. Even if your team is chill, the time for chilling can come when you get a full-time offer. Your internship is grind-time.

Don’t let corporate overhead slow you down

The bigger the company, the bigger the time-sucking bloat. At the start of your internship, you’ll likely be bogged down with company onboarding, intern onboarding, generic corporate training, and team onboarding - all disjointed and potentially oblivious of each other. I’d recommend trying to get through this as fast as possible.

Demonstrate extreme ownership

A critical skill of successful professionals is extreme ownership. You must demonstrate extreme ownership over your project. If you haven’t read Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink, I highly recommend it. Even though it’s written for leaders, you can still apply the principles to your IC work. TLDR: you need to own and ruthlessly follow through on everything related to your project. If you get blocked on something, do everything in your power to unblock yourself. If you’re waiting on something, find something else important to do in the meantime. You and only you are responsible for the success of your project.

When you get to your project, you can’t afford to get blocked for more than a few hours. In 2026, AI can answer most technical questions, and your mentor should be able to answer any company-specific questions.

Test, test, test

A common mistake new engineers make (my former self included) is underestimating the chaos of the real world. Your code may work perfectly in your testing, but throw some unexpected input at it, and it falls apart. There are two key ways to prevent this.

1. Ensure you have a very solid understanding of the full problem statement before you write a single line of code. Do take extra time here - this is arguably the most important step. Gather all potential inputs, evaluate all potential edge cases, think through unexpected ways your code may be used. Forming this mental model upfront will help guide you throughout your implementation.

In school, you’re given exact requirements, inputs, and expected outputs. In the real world, you’re given an often-ambiguous problem statement and expected to figure out the rest.

2. When your code is ready, test it with all the cases you gathered in step 1.

This is more coding advice, but it’s worth saying: if you’re fixing bugs faster than you can count and each fix breaks something new, stop. That’s usually a sign of a flawed foundation. Stepping back and re-architecting can be much faster than endless whack-a-mole — especially for internship-scale projects (and even more so with modern AI). This advice doesn’t always apply to large, mature systems.

Nail your presentation

When you get to your presentation, practice it with yourself, practice it with your mentor, go all out on making it as polished, professional, and impressive as possible. Your PowerPoint visuals should make people go “wow”, your speaking should be clear and engaging, and your delivery should be confident and professional.

Good luck

Anyway, these are just my thoughts. Hope you can take something from them. Do read what others have to say as well. Good luck out there!

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