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Spend your first week trying to understand how your summer projects fit in the overall scheme of things and how/why this will benefit the organization. Understanding the context of the project is crucial as it will help you in framing your final project presentation.
For example, if your project is about understanding employee reactions to a newly launched HR initiative, understand how this is going to help the organization. Is the organization going through high attrition? Why is this initiative a strategic priority to your organization?
How to get a better understanding of your project context? A possible list of questions to get you thinking is “Why is my project important to the organization? What problem/challenge/opportunity is it trying to address? What value/perspective will an intern add to this project?” Ask these questions to your project supervisors during your initial interactions in the first two weeks.
While summer projects are of a two-month duration, it is important to keep the last 10 days for project presentation preparation, last-minute additions to scope, and writing the executive summary. Make a 50-day plan with a week-wise breakup and discuss it with your project guide/buddy and send fortnightly updates as to how your project is progressing.
How to prepare a robust 50-day project plan: A robust 50-day project plan will follow the 80-20 rule with 80% of the time devoted to primary research (interacting with customers/employees/competitors/other stakeholders etc) The rest of the time should be devoted to analysis/documentation/number crunching etc. The plan should also have a date for mid-project review.
The key to a successful summer project is rich insights that are derived from extensive primary research. Extensive primary research ensures that your recommendations are spot on.
How to build rich insights? Based on the nature of your project, decide on the method of primary research, including details like the sample size of stakeholders you want to interact with, mode of research, questions to be asked, etc. Look at various options, list down their pros/cons and decide what works best for you based on cost, quality, time and project context.
It is important that you form your own opinions after doing your primary and secondary research. Do not go only by what you hear from people when you ask them questions about why certain things are working/not working. Reflect upon every input received and use data as the guiding light to eliminate/firm up hypotheses.
How to arrive at the correct hypothesis: The first step is to list down all possible hypotheses for your project problem statement. Once you have listed down all these, finish your primary and secondary research and eliminate the hypotheses which do not seem to be working. Use techniques like 5-why, fishbone, and root-cause analysis to arrive at a conclusion, based on which you can make further recommendations.
Well begun is half the battle won and working rigorously on these actions in the first 30 days of your summer internship will significantly strengthen your chances of landing a PPO.
In the next part of our “Ace your Summer Internship” Series, we will look at mid-project reviews. All the best for your Summer Internship.