1. Get the Basics Clear

Even before you start your internship, research the tech stack you’ll be working on, and start learning it. Learn the basic foundation blocks of the technology you are going to work upon.

Have a good knowledge of OOP principles such as encapsulation, abstraction, inheritance, and polymorphism. These concepts remain the same across all programming languages. Learning the basics of code editor in advance will also give you a headstart.

You can skip the learning framework at this stage, but if your basics are clear it should be pretty easy to pick up on it in the internship period. Once you have the basics you’ll be able to understand the problem more clearly. This will also give your senior colleagues more confidence assigning complex problems to you, rather than solving them by themselves.

2. Always Carry a Notebook

A lot of information will be thrown at you in the initial period of your internship and during the onboarding process. The possibility is high that you may miss out on important things. This is when jotting things down will help.

Writing down also helps to breakdown a complex problem into smaller granular tasks, like a small checklist of problems you are going to solve, which you may have forgotten otherwise. This will also help you in brainstorming and validating your approach towards the problem with other colleagues.

3. Ask Questions

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As an intern or newbie, you should have lots of intriguing questions regarding products and processes followed at your workplace. Don’t be afraid or ashamed to ask those questions.

Understand that at work there’s teamwork — it’s not an individual effort. You may be stuck on the same problem for the whole day — if you had simply asked for help it could have been done in five minutes.

With that said, don’t ask questions whose answers you could easily find online. Documentation of the framework and StackOverflow should come handy here.

4. Read, Write and Refactor

Unlike at your school or Bootcamp, the majority of your time at your internship you will be spent reading other people’s code. Even if you’re assigned a completely new module or functionality, try to read as much as possible. This will ensure that whenever you contribute, you adhere to the standard of organization or team.

Once you’re familiar with the coding practices followed by your team, you can start to contribute. Write clean, maintainable, and extensible code. Don’t forget to test your code. Follow the best practices set up by your team — but you can definitely add your own too!

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