Keep learning to grow your career
So far, we've covered how to network, how to build a professional reputation by delivering well, and how to establish good habits. The last piece of the puzzle is about your mindset. Having the right mindset will set you up for success, not only during your internship but also for the long career awaiting you.
Growth mindset versus fixed mindset
A fixed mindset isn't set up to handle changes well. Such a mindset tends to produce negative thought patterns, the belief that external conditions and personal abilities are set forever and unchangeable.
A growth mindset on the other hand, doesn't have such restrictions. It believes that things can change over time.
Here's an example of a fixed mindset versus a growth mindset:
| Fixed mindset | Growth mindset |
|---|---|
| I'll never pass this calculus exam. I've failed two times already. | I can see I've improved between attempts. I'm sure I will do even better at the next attempt. |
| I can't take on this project. I don't have sufficient skills. | I don't yet have the skills, but I can learn. |
Apart from being situation based, it's also how you look at certain words. Here's an example:
| Fixed mindset | Growth mindset |
|---|---|
| Failure | Experimentation |
| Feedback | Chance for growth |
| Challenge | Learning opportunity |
By adopting and maintaining a growth mindset, you can go farther in life than you ever thought possible.
How to respond to varying situations
A growth mindset can be helpful in a variety of situations. By knowing how to respond in those situations, you emerge stronger as a worker and a person.
- Feedback: In the course of your career, you'll often get feedback, both good and bad. Depending on how you see it, you might have a growth moment. Be open to it, especially the bad feedback. Is it critiquing how you did things or you personally? Can you grow from it?
- Skills: Working in tech means that you must learn new things constantly. A way to ensure that this process becomes natural is to understand how you learn. Some people find out quickly how they learn best, and others might take a bit longer.
Dealing with feedback
To grow, it's important to learn how to accept feedback from others. Whether the feedback is good or bad, it's most useful when it's detailed and actionable. Here's an example of feedback that's hard to deal with but that you can learn from if you ask the right questions:
This presentation was bad.
You're most likely thinking, OK, but I'm not sure what to do about it.
At this point you can ask for clarifications, such as:
Was it all bad, or did you like certain parts? How could I have done it differently?
In situations such as this, the presentation probably wasn't all bad. Maybe there was an important thing you forgot to mention. A good course of action is to seek out this person before your next presentation. Ask for feedback on, say, your overall organization or the effectiveness of your PowerPoint slides. Or maybe the person would allow you to do a dry run of the presentation just for them.
Work on your skills - become a continual learner
You're likely to change your tech stack many times throughout your career, so you need to relearn everything you know every few years. Especially as an intern, there are many new things to learn, so you need to find out how you best learn new information.
A mindset that can be valuable to cultivate is known as "growth-hacking." Growth-hacking, a term derived from the marketing industry, is all about continual personal improvement, with a focus on rapid experimentation and cross-disciplinary learning.
Think of your new job as needing to combine both a skill and domain knowledge. You need to grow your expertise in both.
Let's think about some ways to growth-hack your learning process to cultivate an "always learning" mentality.
Self-study
As an intern, you'll likely run into a ton of new information that you need to learn. Find the best way that you learn, experiment with different modalities, video, text, or whatever suits you.
As Socrates said, "Know thyself." How do you learn? Are you a visual learner? You might benefit from doodling or from drawing sketch notes as you learn a new concept. If you need structured frameworks around your learning, consider bullet-journaling as you read.
Do you prefer learning via videos? Make a curated playlist for yourself on YouTube. Are you someone who learns with articles and books? You can get online copies and add highlights and margin notes by using various software. You're the owner of your own learning, but there are lots of helpful tools and techniques to aid your process.
Set yourself a goal of learning one new thing every day. This new thing doesn't have to be a tech-related activity! Sometimes even your hobbies can inform your grasp of technical topics.
Find a safe place to build, break, and fix things
It might seem strange at first, but it's important to break things (not in a production environment, of course, and not in ways that adversely affect your coworkers!). Find opportunities and safe places to build things, rebuild them, fix them, and break them.
A great deal of learning can happen when you work through the process of building, breaking, and fixing things.
Tip
Be humble. Be sure to listen and learn as much as you can. A good moment for this kind of learning can occur during code reviews, which should be handled in an empathetic way.
Write it down
Some people are visual learners, so consider writing or sketching your problem on paper before trying to express it in code on a computer.
Write about what you learn and publish it on a technical blog, so that you are attaching quality vetted technical content to your name. You'll build your personal brand and benefit your community at the same time. Take 15 minutes each evening to journal about what you learned that day.
Document your work to keep your manager informed of your progress and save a copy of it for yourself so that you can look back at your trajectory. This documentation will also help the next intern on the team.
Keep track of your wins and build a "hype doc" as a personal database that you can refer to when you're asked to explain your trajectory. This will eventually help you to advocate for yourself either to gain advancement in your new company or to impress your next company. You'll end up constructing narratives that you can reflect on in your next job search.
Your human skills
Continual improvement doesn't mean learning only about new technical advances. It also involves sharpening your human skills, your communication, listening, and empathy skills. It turns out that advancing in a career often has more to do with great human skills than with stellar technical expertise, although both can and often do go hand in hand.