My internship ends in 3 weeks.
It’s a weird realization to come to. Have I really been here for 9 weeks? It definitely doesn’t feel that way—I still get a little lost if my meeting is in Volta, I only hooked up my dual monitor setup last Wednesday (even though I’ve had the 2 Thunderbolt displays since day 1, yikes), and I had breakfast in the cafe for the first time just this morning. I still don’t feel like I have it all together, even though I probably should at this point.
Still, it’s pretty hard to actually forget how close I am to finishing my internship. My calendar’s been reminding me that my submission to the Intern Expo is due in only a few days. The Adobe Design program manager’s been sending out tech rehearsal invites to all the interns, so we can practice presenting before we do it in front of the entire design org (oh boy!). My small talk with my team members has gone from chatting about future projects to “When is your internship ending?” and “Here’s what I think we’ll be able to finish before you leave…” My workdays are less furious-hustle-and-bustle and more about refining the small details, or taking on tiny side projects.
In these windows of extra time I’ve come across, I’ve been thinking a lot about how my internship’s gone. Sure, I’ve learned so much about UX, how to work with a cross-disciplinary team, so on and so forth, but I’ve been thinking about more than that: have I been fast enough? Have I been friendly enough? Have I been creative enough? Have I done enough?
I’ve found myself being so preoccupied with these questions, wondering whether I’d left some kind of mark behind as an intern. I spend so many hours each day working alone. My projects move along at a slow but steady pace—as corporate design usually goes, I’ve assumed. But I don’t really know if I’ve been doing well all this time. My manager might just be way too nice in our 1:1 feedback sessions to tell me otherwise!
While I’d been thinking through all of this, I had my latest 1:1 with my manager on Tuesday. As per usual, we talked Fortnite, Utah tourist attractions, and just generally how my internship was going. But one thing he said really stuck with me: “We all think of you as a real member of our team.”
He’d been talking about how hard it was that my desk was so far from the rest of the team, and how I’d been missing out on some of the fun, team bonding conversations because of it. He’d suggested I come over to the other side of the desks any time—and then, that quote.
For the past 9 weeks, being a part of the team socially hasn’t exactly been on the forefront of my mind. I’ve been so tied up with my work! And there hasn’t been much opportunity to talk to the other members casually, with how far away they were, even though I made an effort if I saw them before meetings or just walking around the office. Past the first week of my internship, we’d only eaten lunch together once. I’d kind of accepted that this is how things were, until that 1:1, and hearing my manager say that really warmed my heart.
You might remember from one of my early posts that I eat lunch with a group of gamers pretty often (now, just about every day!). At the beginning, I felt kind of like an outsider—they’d all been friends for years and years, and they were all at least 10 years older than me. I thought they’d never really go out of their way to invite me to games outside of work hours. But last Friday, at our post-game lunch, one of the players said to me, “We’re really going to miss you, Kim.” I’d thought he was being a little sarcastic, considering this group is full of memers and trolls. Just yesterday, though, as I was leaving lunch, our biggest memer had repeated the sentiment with extremely surprising sincerity: “I’m really, really glad you interned here. We’re going to miss you!”
Hearing all of this started to make me feel like all this work, all these past 9 weeks of sometimes hard, sometimes sleepless work, were all worth it. I’m still not sure if I was fast enough, or friendly enough, or creative enough when it comes to my work—will I ever know, for sure?–but maybe that’s not all there is to an internship. When these next 3 weeks are up, and I think about “Have I done enough?”, maybe all the answer I need is the knowledge that there are people here who will remember me as a real team member or a friend.
Questions? Comments? Let me know down below!
