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Manager is not giving additional work to me and not sure what to do [intern]

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Intern at Taro Community6 months ago

I'm an intern and I have around 3 weeks left in my internship. I'm not too sure what to do with this because I'm aware that maybe I didn't leave the project at the optimal pace and he said he would "take it from here" but there is still time. I've tried to ask my mentor if I should do anything and they said I should coffee chat with people but I don't think this is going to look good when I'm presenting to VPs next week. Any feedback would be appreciated. My manager & skip is on vacation this week as well.

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Discussion

(2 comments)
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    Tech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
    6 months ago

    If the project isn't in an optimal place, why not bring it to that place? It doesn't seem like you're forbidden from making progress on it - I think your mentor is just trying to be nice and push you to enjoy the last couple weeks of your internship (back at Meta, we were told to do this with our interns as well in the final ~2 weeks). This feels like one of those situations where it's better to bias towards action and ask for forgiveness instead of permission if things go wrong.

    Regardless, you should still have those ☕ chats if you have spare cycles. Networking is super important! Check these out if you haven't already:

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    Tech Lead/Manager at Meta, Pinterest, Kosei
    6 months ago

    If you don't want to work on your primary project, find other productive work to do. As an intern, you don't have much time and you frankly don't have much trust. So the changes you should make should be small and well-contained. Ideas:

    • Fix some papercuts in the project
    • Fix some unit test or code comments
    • Add screenshots or videos to the wiki/documentation

    See this video from the internship course: Working With Your Intern Manager.