Since Joel from www.joelonsoftware.com is done blogging, there’s an opening for a good blog. Let’s see what happens.
The advice is simple yet it took me a long time to arrive at: the work you do is really not that important ( so long as it is in your field of interest). You don’t have a lot of interest in anything in particular? Keep on reading.
The crucial element is the mentor. I cannot stress this enough. Find someone who is good at what they do and, this is very important, that you work well with. It’s hard to figure the second part out especially without working with them to start with, but the chemistry (or lack thereof) is usually kind of easy to spot.
A good mentor will help you grow more than you could by yourself. They can motivate and guide you. They can exert both positive and negative pressure. Volunteer for someone, you have nothing to lose. Your time is everything you have to offer, and a mentor can help you make great use of it. They can help you grow.
It does not matter if the project is not a perfect match: a good mentor will know how to sell it to you. It’s really not about “selling” per se but more about getting someone excited about stuff. Revealing an ultimate goal, a tangible objective. Making you feel that you are building something useful.
There is something to be said about the “marketing” skills of a mentor. If they manage to motivate a project and paint their vision clearly everything else will follow. A good motivation is quickly internalized by students and generates real results, it really entices them to work. Grades and other types of coercion/seduction systems currently used (salary bonuses for example) are almost never internalized, so they won’t really engage students/employees at the core. Sure, they might get some results, but a lot of times they backfire, and a search on studies analyzing incentives will show you that most of the time they actually disengage people and make them less passionate. Don’t replace passion with money or fear, direct it. Stimulate it with interesting ideas.
This is what school assignments lack: you work on something that will be thrown out at the end of the class. If the assignments were things that will be part of, say, an open-source project then the incentive is different: your work will be used by other people for real projects. You are part of something greater.
For some classes it is tricky to do this (Calculus for example) but one can easily imagine a way to turn some of the assignments into fun-looking projects that will be of use to someone.
Tags: internships, marketing, passion, technology
