I just finished off the last internship of my undergraduate career. I was working in the optimizer team at Cockroach Labs, a job I thoroughly enjoyed, and one that also makes the title of this post a fitting word play.

Thanks to UWaterloo’s co-op program, I’ve had the privilege to work 6 internships in 3 different cities, at companies as small as 40 to as large as 350,000, in both suburban and urban settings. All of that has given me a much better sense of what I’d need to look for in a job going forward.

That’s a very valuable thing to learn — especially before one make that all-important full time work decision. Or whether one decides to do full time work in the industry in the first place, instead of something like grad school.

Here are some of the most helpful learnings I gained over the past 4 years, many of them learned the hard way. The hope is, you won’t have to learn it the hard way. Some of the examples may be tech-specific, but the general points should be the same across industries.

Aim for a big company internship — at some point

This one is probably pretty obvious to you. Working at a company like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon or Facebook (or their counterparts in other industries) is a quick and reliable way to make yourself more marketable to the rest of the industry. Plus, you get to experience what working at a big company feels like — from the structured evaluation/promotion processes and stability to the bureaucracy and the reduced sphere of influence.

It’s easiest to get hired at a big company in a later internship — some companies have term/year filters, and others ask for more experienced candidates. The Facebook Menlo Park 4A btw meme on /r/uwaterloo exists for a reason — around 20 people or approximately a quarter of my class worked at Facebook in the work term after their 4A term.

Working at a big company in the very last term may not be a good idea if you end up not liking it, but it’s still preferable to never working at one. Working at one in 3rd year may be the optimal strategy, but the cards don’t fall that way for a lot of people which is fine.

Network around and sell yourself — especially at big companies

This one didn’t strike me until my second big company internship, and I still didn’t live it well. A lot of young people, like myself, tend to assume that our self profiles are obvious to everyone around us, and that we can do our job so well that our work ends up marketing itself. That doesn’t quite work out always.

Tell your manager/mentor about your priorities (both short and long term), your progress, your challenges, and your breakthroughs. Don’t expect them to just know.

In addition to that, contact other teams that interest you. Get to know their interns, their senior people, their managers, anyone who seems helpful. Talk about your work, ask them about theirs, etc. Build a network and maintain it through occasional chats. You’ll also get lots of helpful advice and mentorship along the way.

A close friend of mine once connected me to a new grad full timer in a different part of the company, who had some common technical interests with me. His advice about how to pick teams was invaluable to me. In another instance, I mentioned the prospect of grad school to my manager, and he very selflessly gave me advice (tailored to my own preferences) regarding the pros and cons of academia.

Big companies have a lot of things going on, and you’re going to have to sell yourself. Don’t solely rely on a recruiter handling 50 interns, or a manager you had infrequent 1:1s with, to know about all your strengths when it matters.

In one of my internships, I got a fairly negative midterm evaluation where a lot of the criticism was not even applicable to my work (i.e. it was errors induced by other teams). Since I never really brought up those matters, the person doing the evaluation only saw the failure and assumed it was due to my incompetence. Thankfully, I learned my lesson, started communicating things more effectively, and salvaged my final evaluation.

If things go south, learn and move on; your career is greater than just one internship

The chances of this are slim, but you might have an internship where things don’t fall in line the way they should. You might end up with an unhelpful/overly-critical manager, or a team that doesn’t respect you, or just a toxic work culture. You could (and probably should, though it’s hard to make a general statement) bring these instances up to your manager/HR, but let’s say you try that and it doesn’t really help.

Take notes (whether physical or mental) of what went wrong and why. If the topic escalates internally, you’ll be able to directly reference your story and make a coherent argument. In addition, in the long run it’ll make you much better at identifying warning signs and indicators in future jobs, and you’ll be better at responding to these things.

And don’t forget: it’s just an internship. Bad times will come to an end, and you’ll be able to take your skills elsewhere. Even better, you’ll be much better at identifying great jobs going forward. Your career is much, much greater than one internship — don’t blame the whole industry (and sometimes, even the whole company) for what you went through.

I once had an internship, where some meetings got so heated and pointed that I’d regularly hide in washroom stalls after they ended, cry, and text my sister over encrypted messaging apps for advice. At another point, in a 1:1 in some internship, I constructively criticized a trait of the code reviews I was facing, and how they could be improved given my project’s realities. Next thing I know, this supposedly-confidential comment got shared team-wide and some people started (mockingly) referencing it in code review comments on my work.

I started to question whether I deserved to be at those places, or in the industry side of tech in the first place. I made grad school a more serious consideration, motivated in part by spite.

Looking at the people around me in those places, I noticed a distinct lack of diversity. Even worse than the tech averages. Not surprising at all, given I heard explicitly racist and implicitly sexist jokes myself. People who already feel out of place for demographic reasons, would be the first ones to quit a place like that when the work gets terribly unsatisfying.

Now that’s an indicator.

Don’t filter by location

Dusk over Waterloo

Another super obvious tip, and one I’ve kinda written about previously. Don’t filter out a great place to work just because it’s located in a place you don’t like.

It’s understandable to filter out jobs in places that pay less for financial reasons. It’s why I never applied to Europe jobs, even though people working there have more fun than I’ve ever had in my life. But if a job is great, be open to looking past the location aspect.

Don’t Cali or Bust. Also don’t exclude California like I once tried. It’s just a 4-month internship; and besides, you can travel wherever you want in your free time.

Some of the most interesting and learning-filled internships my friends had, were in less hyped places like Pittsburgh, Ottawa, Boston, Calgary, and Boulder, CO.

Finally, don’t be afraid to ask your peers for help!

Around half of all UWaterloo interns in NYC in Fall 2018

Chances are, your peers will gladly share what’s working out well in their careers, and what isn’t. You can’t work at 50 companies in 5 years, but you only need ~10 friends who’ve worked at 5 distinct places (plus yourself) to know about 50 contexts of work. You’ll also learn about the different perspectives people have in making these decisions. Interning is like any other experiment; the more data you have, the more you can learn!

If you have any questions, or if you have any suggestions/comments about this article — I’d be more than happy to help/listen. Happy career navigating!

Shameless plug: Some of my classmates are working on a peer mentorship and networking community centred around in-person interactions. Their platform is called Hive and they’re doing a trial run at UWaterloo. Check them out!

I’m in no way affiliated with Hive save for knowing the people behind it, and finding it cool.