Setting your Goals

Objectives and Key Results.

A lot of interns aren’t given real projects and feel like they can't make an impact, so they just kind float along. My advice: Write down a few goals you would like to accomplish this summer and bring them up to your manager. Your manager will respect your initiative and try his or her best to help you achieve those goals. And if said goals are written as

OKRs⁠

, well, that's the internship equivalent of

a clear plastic binder.⁠

⁠

What are OKRs? OKRs were invented by

Andy Grove⁠

--who fled the Nazis to become the CEO of Intel and an all-up Silicon Valley magnate. John Doerr

brought them to Google⁠

, and now OKRs are standard practice the business-world over. They're designed to maintain alignment across teams and broadcast company goals. For your case, however, you can make a single-player version for the summer.

First, set an Objective (I want to make as many friends and contacts as possible this summer) and then come up with quantifiable Key Results to go with it. i.e. Get at least two references; Organize a party for all the interns. (If your plate is already full of small tasks and initiatives, you can do a bottoms-up approach. Bucket your tasks into themesーturn those themes into objectives, and then come up with relevant key results from there.) Either way, your goals should feel like a stretch. It's a "reach for the moon, land among the stars" strategy.

⁠

My first OKR

My first OKR

Objective

Key Result

Mid-point update

FINAL

Be the most popular kid in my internship class

Organize an end-of-summer get-together for all the interns.

000

0.8

000

0.8

Schedule 1-1s with 30 people.

000

0.2

000

0.6

Own a project.

Partner with my boss to conceive of a project.

000

0.9

Present project results out to company.

000

0.5

In so doing, use two new tools, and be able to add them to my CV.

Learn to live like an adult.

Live on a budget.

Refill house supplies/paper towels at least 3x.

Be a good roommate.

⁠

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