Guidelines for Interns

Welcome! You are here to learn while contributing meaningfully to our important mission - a win-win! We want to ensure you are set-up to grow, contribute and have a great experience, and that includes helping you adopt good habits for outstanding individual contributors (“managers of one”).

To help you make steady progress, we require you to put together an internship plan and have 360 reviews at the 2-week , mid-, and end-points of your internship. These required feedback sessions are opportunities for you to curate your own growth experience, solicit support around a challenge, or expand your responsibilities.

If at any time, you are feeling lost, confused, or unmotivated, do not wait, hoping it will get better. Raise your concerns with your Sponsor right away.

Who’s involved?

Your internship sponsor will be your point of contact for the duration of the internship. Their task is to support you to meet your educational goals, contribute meaningfully to Cadence OneFive’s work, and have a great experience.

Responsibilities of your Sponsor include:

  • Meeting with you at least weekly - don’t think of your meetings with your onboarding guide as an obligation on you. They are giving you time and attention, so make the most of the opportunity in that spirit.

  • Helping to define your educational goals and timelines

  • Supporting you in making steady progress against your goals, and when necessary, to help you pivot and adapt in response to new information

  • Pro-actively checking on the quality of your remote/async experience, encouraging you to understand and articulate your needs as a remote worker, and making the internship experience fun

  • Cultivating manager-of-one-ship by modeling and encouraging workplace behaviors that embody responsible autonomy and teamwork

  • Using their professional network to connect you to further opportunities

Your day-to-day colleagues, the folks you will work with most closely, will also be available to you for guidance and mentorship. We’re all happy to help you!

You may have an outside advisor(s), especially if you are here as part of a collaboration with an academic institution. If you have an outside advisor, their role should be documented in your internship plan.

Confidential information: You signed a proprietary information and inventions agreement (PIIA) as a condition of your internship, and you should not share confidential information with folks outside Cadence OneFive. If you have any concerns about what’s confidential, ask your Sponsor!

What’s the internship plan?

By the end of your onboarding period, you will have an internship plan that articulates your learning, contribution, and professional growth goals. It should also outline how you intend to accomplish them: activities to be undertaken and/or work to be done on a weekly basis. While the plan may evolve, it should be in a complete, if preliminary, form the first week of the internship.

Draft your internship plan in Google Workspace and invite your Sponsor and stakeholders as commenters. At minimum, you should give access to your Sponsor as early as you’re comfortable. The draft feedback process is part of the learning experience!

Keep your internship plan well-structured and as short as possible, without skimping on details that are necessary for the reader to get a pretty good understanding of how to help you.

Internship Plan Outline

| Part 1: Goals
   
Learning Goals & Success Criteria - What are you here to learn?
- Identify who will provide technical or academic guidance, if such is required (and this person may or may not be your Sponsor)
Contribution Goals & Success Criteria Contributions may be:
- Outcome-oriented (working toward accomplishing some specific future state of, for example, the code base, where the contributing activities are not easily defined up front)
or
- Project-oriented (have a beginning, middle, and end with specific deliverables that are known at the outset)
Professional Growth Goals - What professional skillset or manager-of-one habits are you hoping to try or strengthen?
Part 2: Stakeholders  
At Cadence OneFive - What are the roles and your expectations of the individuals you will work closely with over the internship?
- What are their expectations of you?
Outside Cadence OneFive - Who are people outside Cadence OneFive who have an interest in your successful internship?
- What are your expectations of them?
- What are their expectations of you?
Part 3: Work Plan  
Weekly Schedule Your anticipated deliverables and activities by week. Be sure to make time for
- 2-week 360, mid-point, and final 360s
- Mid-point and wrap-up presentations (and send your presentation calendar invites asap!). The mid-point and final presentation of work will be to all your stakeholders, not just to the Sponsor.

What’s the 360 feedback?

You will receive regular feedback during your internship and we also want to empower you to lead the feedback discussions. At Cadence OneFive, the 360 is an integrative consent process for you to assess your progress toward your goals and gather input from your stakeholders. The ability to take initiative and proactively ask for feedback will be an invaluable skill within your professional development toolkit.

Use a 45-minute meeting to conduct a diagnostic on how you are doing, how you’ll succeed, and where you need support. Consider:

  • Are you successful so far?

  • What are your deliverables/milestones and have you achieved the ones you expected to achieve by this point?

  • How have your contributions shown up for the team? How have you helped others succeed?

  • Do you have (or heading toward) manager-of-one mastery of your portfolio of work?

  • Does your understanding of what you’re autonomously responsible for match up with your stakeholders’ understanding?

  • How does your understanding of how others can help you compare with their own?

  • How are you positioned to succeed in the coming 30 days (or beyond)?

  • How do you plan to support your stakeholders’ success?

  • How do you need to be supported going forward?

Your Internship Run-of-Show

Onboarding

The goal of intern onboarding is independence and empowerment.

Day One Tasks

  • Get setup on tools

  • Write your personal README and hello-world it in #_announcements

  • Review other READMEs

  • Review horizontal practices wheel to get you oriented

Reminder! Set up 2-factor authentication for Google Workspace on Day 1! You’ll lose access 48 hours after first login if you don’t!

First Week

GOAL: Finalize your internship plan.

You may find yourself in sponge mode the first week and that’s great! Be sure to use your time this week to complete your draft internship plan.

Don’t forget to:

  • Set up 30-min 1:1 meetings with your sponsor

  • Meet you closest working group/peers

Watch out for scams! No one at Cadence OneFive, including Bomee, will ever text you or email you asking you to buy gift cards (or use your own money for any company purpose)! If you get a text message claiming to be one of us, report it to the FTC.

Second Week

GOALS: Contribute something to a project or to our knowledge base; Gather feedback on your internship plan and make updates.

Set out with the intent to do something that also helps the team this week, no matter how small. Maybe it’s some documentation that needs updating. Maybe it’s swatting a bug.

Hopefully, you’ve been getting input from your stakeholders on your draft internship plan. Try to get clarifications prior to your first 360 (but don’t stress if you don’t!) so you can make the most of your 45 min 360 meeting by having a rich, substantive discussions.

By the 2-week 360

  • You’re able to articulate what you are working on and early wins you have delivered so far for the company.

  • Stakeholders are able to understand how you see your work from reading your internship plan, even if they’re seeing it for the first time.

  • Your internship plan reflects clear understanding of the work you’ve defined for yourself and how it fits into the work of the company

Internship Mid-Point

Hopefully it’s going gangbusters! We’re all excited to participate in your mid-point 360. You should feel confident in what you are doing and comfortable reaching out to any member of the team. You should also have a mix of quick wins and longer assignments under your belt.

  • Mid-point presentation: You’ll give a 10-minute presentation to the company and any external stakeholders you wish to invite, followed by 20-minutes of Q/A.

  • Mid-point 360: Following the presentation, you’ll conduct your 360 with your stakeholders. Remember, these feedback sessions are designed to help you be successful. Do not hesitate to ask for help or let your sponsor know that what you are working on is not meeting your expectations (too easy, too difficult, etc.).

Wrap-up

Toward the end of your internship, you will be expected to present your work to the company during a brown bag session or other designated team meeting. Your sponsor will work with you on the timing and set the meeting up. The presentation should include:

  • How your work aligned to our company goals

  • Your thoughts on what you accomplished and what you learned

  • Next academic or professional steps (don’t be shy - we are here to support you and your relationship with us does not end at day 90!)

Off-boarding

  • Document your work - share your process so the next intern can build on what you have created, rather than start at square one. We have additional  information on why and how we document our processes here: Process Documentation

  • Complete the intern survey - this will help us understand what is working and what may need to improve about our internships.