How I communicate my intention to contribute meaningfully in my team

 At the start of my internship, I was assigned a mentor who is a software engineer with experience related to my project. My mentor acts as the main point of contact for any project-specific and team-related questions. My communication with my mentor is very frequent and consists of technical and non-technical conversations regarding different parts of my team and project. However, I have weekly one-on-one meetings with my manager to discuss any project questions, my progress, and about my career plans beyond my internship. I have used conversations with my manager to discuss the different roles in my team and how their contributions relate to the larger team goals. I have expressed how I find some of the projects that the team is working on very interesting and how I would prefer a more back-end than font-end role.

Since my team is mainly working on integrating a new feature to different Microsoft clients, I find it harder to find varying ways of contributing to my team. This means that my tasks as a full-time engineer on this team will be determined based on the Microsoft client my team will be focusing on when I start work. Although I have not explicitly mentioned any specific products I would like to work on, I have communicated to my manager about my intentions to enhance some parts of my project if I get to work on it as a full-time engineer. I plan to continue conversations with my manager to learn more about and to discuss different ways I can contribute to the team’s current and future projects.

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