5 Tips to Make the Most of Your Internship
By: Hafsa Mansoor
Internships are hard. Trying to balance squeezing the maximum amount of experiences into just a handful of weeks with all of your other law school responsibilities. To balance learning new skills outside your wheelhouse with adding value to the organization and meaningfully contributing to its work. To balance remaining positive and optimistic throughout the internship while working through inevitable fatigue. But when you strike the right balance, your internship can be a meaningful personal and professional experience that advances your career.
Here are 5 tips to help you strike that balance.
1. No one expects you to be an expert at your substantive work, but you do have to get the easy stuff right. If you have a deadline, meet it. If you say you’ll get something done by a certain date, do. If you’re given directions—two spaces after a sentence, spend only 2 hours on this project, results in a bullet-point email not a memo please, etc.—follow them. Show up on time. Abide by the office dress code. Stay in contact with your supervising attorney and update them when your work hits an unexpected bump. Learn how to write a good email and communicate effectively with your team. The point is, the easiest way to build your supervisor’s confidence in you is to: (1) focus on honing these sorts of soft skills so that your supervisor only has to teach you the hard skills and help with the substantive law, and (2) make sure you’re doing what you’ve been asked to do so that you’re delivering the results your supervisor expects.
2. Care about what you’re doing. Supervisors want to work with an intern who wants to be part of the team... not one who wants to be anywhere but there. If you’re watching the clock until you can leave every day, not interested in learning more, and doing the bare minimum but no more—you’re showing your supervisors that you don’t really care about being there. And how invested you are in your internship is directly proportional to how much time and energy your supervisor will invest in you and your internship too. That means performing all of your assignments to the best of your ability (what, from an Islamic framework, would be implementing ihsan), asking what more you can do for the team rather than checking out once you’ve crossed an assignment off your to-do list, and being curious about the big picture rather than just your tiny corner of it. It also means taking the initiative to ask if you can join a project that interests you because it’s a subject area you want to learn more about, a skill you want to hone, or a team you want to work with. Note also, though, what this doesn't mean: it doesn't mean you have to work overlong hours or bury yourself in work. Rather, it means that when you're there, be there—fully and consciously. Show that you are invested in being there, and other people should be invested in you too.
3. When someone gives you feedback, appreciate it. Giving feedback takes a lot of time, thought, and effort. So when someone makes the investment to give you feedback, appreciate it. That means more than just saying thank you (although that certainly goes a long way); it also means implementing feedback. Instead of hitting the button to accept all track changes without reviewing them, go edit-by-edit. Understand why each was made, ask clarifying questions if needed, and then implement those changes throughout the work product and in subsequent projects. Make new mistakes, not the same mistakes. Otherwise, supervisors won't want to keep giving you feedback—or, for that matter, more work. Relatedly, recognize that feedback comes in multiple forms; sometimes it’s formal (like edits on work product or performance reviews), but it can be informal, too (like comments made in passing about something someone else did, conversations over lunch, or strategy brainstorming sessions). Finally, feedback can be both negative (things to do better next time) and positive (what you’re already doing right), so focus on implementing the edits for next time, but also focus on honing and playing up your strengths. It all comes together to make you a better lawyer.
4. Ask good questions. People worry asking questions might make them look bad. But I’ve found that questions are actually my superpower. Maybe asking questions reveals my current ignorance, but, if I don’t ask the questions, all I’ve done is guarantee my ignorance lasts longer. And I’d rather temporarily look ignorant than actually long-term be ignorant. So if you need information, ask the questions necessary to get it. And, far from making you look bad, good questions can actually show how good you are. For instance, when I supervised junior associates on document reviews, I rarely checked the workstream document-by-document or reviewer-by-reviewer, which meant I primarily interfaced with the juniors when they had questions. The quality of their questions was my only indicator for the quality of their work. Now, to be clear, I’m not saying all questions are universally good questions. Bad questions are, for example, those you easily could have gotten the answer to with a quick Google/Lexis search, those you were already given the answer to by your supervising attorney, or those asked in inopportune circumstances (like when you’re under a too-tight deadline or in front of a client and appear to be second-guessing your team). On the other hand, good questions are, for example, those that show you’ve been paying attention, are invested in learning more, and enable you to be a better lawyer and a stronger part of the team. Don't ask questions for the sake of asking questions, but don't shy away from asking the good, important questions either.
5. When you have a problem, raise it the right way. Instead of immediately taking a problem to your supervising attorney and asking them to fix it for you, take a moment to contemplate the problem and try to propose a solution. Ideally, your solution is fully-baked and ready-to-implement, but sometimes you’re just out of your depth—which is perfectly understandable, since you’re the intern or junior attorney. But it’s important to try to craft at least a rough outline of a solution to show that you’ve thought through the issue and you understand the parameters of the problem and the underlying objective from the client. That’s how you go from thinking like a law student to thinking like a lawyer. And keep in mind that, with the notable exception perhaps of statutes of limitations, almost every mistake is fixable. So, however the problem came to be, focus on the fix.
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Internships are hard, but hopefully these five tips help you strike the necessary balances to make them a little easier.
Internships are also hard for supervisors. Mario Reyes Solano (Columbia Law ‘25), an excellent intern who has been supervised by a half-dozen supervisors, has five tips for supervisors to help them strike the balance too: https://www.naml.info/post/welcome-to-the-muslim-legal-journal/5-tips-for-supervisors.