<aside> 👋🏼 Sometimes it’s hard to feel motivated by your internship project— I get it. It may not be what you’re interested in and you don’t feel connected to the work. In order to not be miserable for the next three months, let’s find an external motivator you can use to get you through the internship. Below are some examples you can use and how I recommend you keep track of these motivators to keep you going.

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External Motivators

I. Find Something You Want To Learn

• Who you are: Someone who is fascinated by learning and loves to grow their base of knowledge. You have an itch to learn a particular skill or subject that you’ve never gotten the chance to dig into. The company you’re at has the resources and people to help you learn this one thing that you’ve been dying to grasp or understand.
• How To Execute: Set two hours a week to learn this skill/tool/area of interest. Checkout company documentation and find an expert in the area. See if this expert can meet with you to talk about their experiences or can help mentor you as you learn about this concept throughout the internship. Set two hours a week to learn this subject.
• How To Keep Track:
  • Write out what you want to learn in the beginning of the internship.
  • Make an attainable goal and a reach goal.
  • Before you start learning and diving into the work, write out what you don’t know, so you can go back at the end of the internship and see the progress made.
  • Add your new learnings and findings to your Success Tracker and any meetings you have with mentors to your Meeting Log.

II. Making Impact

• Who you are: You have a tech internship, but you’re driven by helping people. You see injustices in the system at the company or outside of the company and you want to make a change. You won’t feel fulfilled just working on a design/code/product system for the whole summer. You know it’s not only in the company’s best interest to create impact, but they also have the resources and influence to do so.
• How To Execute: Depending on the area of impact you want to have, reach out to a person of higher importance at the company who can make your change happen i.e. recruiter for your college, recruiter for your home town, your manager, your skip manager etc. If you want to start an initiative and you’re meeting with a higher up, prep before— create either a pitch deck or have a concise pitch ready for why they should put time, money, energy towards this initiative.
• How To Keep Track:
  • Write out what a problem is that you think is important and your company can help with.
  • Brainstorm either an initiative or something you can assist with that can help aid this problem. Create an attainable goal and a reach goal.
  • Research people who you can talk to in this field of impact. You can do this by asking your manager if they know anyone or going on your company website.
  • Write out the steps that need to be taken in order to achieve wanted impact.
  • Add your new findings about your topic of impact to your Success Tracker and any meetings you have with mentors to your Meeting Log.

III. Money As a Motivator

• Who you are: You’re not trying to exert extra energy in an internship, as it’s already a lot of work. You’re making solid bank during this job and this money will help to pay off debts or loans, or pay for school, housing, family needs, etc. This is a huge step in your financial journey, and it’s time to be proud of yourself for getting here.
• How To Execute: Just let it hit your bank account bb💰🤑. No extra work required:)
• How To Keep Track:
  • Create a list of the big purchases/payments you want to make with the money you make over the course of the internship.
  • Break these purchases/payments down into smaller goals.
  • Create a tracker of your inflow of cash: 1k, 5k, 10k.....
  • Every time a deposit hits your bank account check off these smaller goals that will lead to the bigger purchases/payments
  • When you reach your smaller or larger goals, set up a little celebration for yourself— you did that!!