Intern Morale Events - Why is Team Culture important in shaping your success?

How to have a successful internship, while also have fun and enjoy the experience?

North Bend, Washington

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For an Audio Summary, click the Play button below:

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As you get started with your internship, you might wonder how to balance your time between working hard, while at the same time prioritize some fun moments. How do you meet the key objectives of your internship, and at the same time feel energized and enjoy the ride? To help you create this balance, all major intern programs across the tech industry offer Intern Morale events, as an essential part of the intern experience. These events are uniquely designed to instill a sense of community and provide a huge opportunity for new interns to connect and learn from one another. As you start on your internship, you will likely get added to a bunch of email lists, team groups or slack channels, dedicated to provide support to interns and help organize some morale events. So you might wonder how should you handle all the invitations of going out and having fun.

“Would I waste my precious time if I join the intern events? How will it reflect on my performance and evaluation? Am I only expected to join morale events organized by my own team? Would I hurt someone’s feelings if I keep declining all their event invites?”, you may ask yourself.

When I started as an intern at Microsoft back in 2005, there was a famous distribution list, called “ms-interns”. This email list was famous for an endless stream of emails from thousands of interns at the company. The initial perception I had of the group was to stay away and not get entangled in the flood of invites and events. However, I kept an eye out for some of the major events getting planned. One such event, was the famous “Lunch at Bill Gates House”. I would probably not go in the details of that event in this post, as it would require a dedicated article. There were other events like the “Hiking at Mount Rainier” with all the interns, which I did attend. Overall the company wide events were very well organized and had a huge participation from the intern community.

Attending a few of these events was really valuable as it gave me a good sense of the diverse backgrounds from which interns came at Microsoft, and got me a few early connections at the company. During these events, I also got to pick up a general sense of culture of the overall company. A number of these events used to be attended by a few leaders across the company and this provided a valuable opportunity to interact with them in these off work settings.

Tip #1: Attending a few company wide morale events provides a valuable opportunity to learn about the company culture. If this is the place where you will end up starting your career, it will benefit you to learn about the big picture.

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