“Looks like an intern messed up something, lol.”
– You (probably)
Now I know what it feels like to be that intern a lot of people joke about when a company does a release with bugs in it. From my experience, I can tell you that the intern will panic, and feel their entire future is collapsing when they realize the mistake they’ve made. Then their manager comes back to them and says “Eh, it happens.”
That was me. There was a visibility issue in my content that made it into production and no one realized for a week or two until I stumbled upon it. I shouldn’t minimize the negative impact it had on the documentation, because it did; images didn’t show up and variables like UI controls didn’t appear. But at the same time, I need to remember that you can’t always avoid mistakes; the most important thing is how you dealt with the situation (I fixed it by the end of my lunch break). I had a great manager that helped me get into this mindset.
If you’re an intern reading this with anxiety about making mistakes, there’s no point worrying about it because it is inevitable. You’re going to make mistakes, and you’re going to learn a lot from them. Don’t let this fear block the quality work you know you can produce. Make sure you do things the best you can, follow process/procedure, and learn.
Here’s something worse: what if your lack of experience impacts your confidence?
That was also me. I was tasked with writing a parameter user guide for a warehouse management system, and the information I had was written by developers from Denmark. This was the first “big” task I worked on as an intern in my second week, and I wasn’t completely comfortable using the tools to do it. So, what did my work look like? It was basically just a copy-edit of the original text from the developer. It didn’t consider the audience, contained a lot of unnecessary information, was wordy, and worst of all: lacked clarity. I was scared to make big changes to what the SME (subject matter expert) wrote because to me, they were the expert. However, this doesn’t mean they’re an expert at conveying their information…
It took me some time to break out of this shell to fully trust myself and accept the fact that it’s okay to condense 90% of the content a SME wrote to improve clarity for the user. For example, the developer would write something like “The XYZ system relays data to the SQL server in the form of XML, CSV, TSV, and is stored in the ABC table…”
The worker in the warehouse doesn’t need to know this, and would be a waste of time for them to understand it. They just need to know what it does so they can complete the task. I would just rewrite it to “Data is exported to the database when the barcode is scanned.”
My work improved exponentially when I removed this mental confidence block. Not having confidence actually made me a bad writer.
These two points were probably the biggest lessons I took away from my experience. I learned a lot about who I am as a person and how that impacted my work. Hopefully reading about my experience can help you reflect as an intern.
Remember, don’t stress too much, have fun at your internship, and learn as much as you can (especially from your inevitable mistakes).
Technical Kevin 