What I would change about my internship experience

This was the second to last week of my internship as a software engineering intern in One Drive and SharePoint at Microsoft. I was drafting my final project presentation slides when I asked myself what I could change about my internship experience if I would start it all over.

One thing I would change about my internship is not spending so much time on the engineering design document and trying to understand all the tiny details of how my project was to work together. My initial plan was to spend about two instead of three weeks writing the engineering design document for my project. I spent more time trying to confirm that the approach I presented in the document was an approach that worked with the project I was building my solution off. However, having a close to working approach did not matter during my engineering design document review session. My manager and team really wanted me to have thought through the bigger-picture parts of my project and not the tiny details. Since I had debugged the existing code and had dummy implementations of my approach, my design document was very detailed with code implementations of half my approach. Spending a lot of time on this phase of my project caused me to fall behind on my schedule by a week, which required me working outside the normal work hours to catch. Although I eventually caught up, I feel like the pressure from falling behind my project plan and catching up could all be avoided if I controlled how much detail I tried to add to my design document.

Another aspect of my project that I would have done differently is mixing some remote workdays in to my schedule especially when I did not have meetings. I noticed that I made my biggest progress with the project when I worked from home. I think the major contributor to this progress is how I was less distracted working remotely than in the office where there are many intern events, long team lunches, and other activities. A hybrid approach to my internship would have allowed me good time attending social events and sufficient focus on my project.