Internships are something young students chase with the same enthusiasm we had hunting for Easter eggs as kids. Everyone wants one, and I was no exception. It's the cherry on top of the ice cream, proof that you're finally stepping into the world outside of school.
In second year, I decided I'd learned enough in class and just needed real experience, so I applied to every position I saw, conveniently ignoring the fact that I was still a full-time student with zero spare hours. Here are the 5 mistakes that came out of that decision.
Mistake #1: I applied for an internship that wasn't even in my area
During my "shoot my shot at everything" phase, the one response I actually got had requirements that had nothing to do with what I wanted to do. It was an internship position, mostly stuff that wasn't related to coding. Coding, the thing I actually wanted experience in, was maybe 5% of the job description. This mattered more than I realized at the time, because recruiters don't just look at whether you have experience, they look at whether your experience connects to the role you're applying for. Want to be a data analyst? They want to see you cleaning data and pulling insights from it, not managing a content calendar.
Mistake #2: I had expectations
Even though the internship wasn't on my career path, I still walked in with a whole fantasy: I'd be super professional, learning a million things a second, everything laid out step by step, a mentor holding my hand the whole way. Reality humbled me fast. Most of my internship was me staring at a task with no instructions, having to figure it out alone. It was stressful enough that I quit after a month. A few days later, a former manager asked me what I thought I’d learn and I went completely blank. In a strange way, I had learned a lot, just not in the neat, guided way I'd pictured. It was messy and exhausting, so at the time it didn't feel like growth. Looking back, it clearly was.
Mistake #3: Saying yes without considering my capacity
Internships are a great way to get experience, and sometimes they lead to actual jobs, but I said yes without asking myself if I actually had the time. I was juggling school, the gym, projects, side courses, and a demanding internship, all at once. Human beings aren't made of elastic. We can't stretch that far. With everything split across so many places, nothing got 100% of me, not school, not work, not myself. The lesson: check whether you actually have room for something before you commit to it. Grind in your 20s, sure, but don't grind yourself to dust.
Mistake #4: Not communicating with my boss
I had a habit of trying to prove I could handle anything. So whenever a task was hard, my instinct was to sit with it alone rather than admit I was stuck. I'd get an assignment, however confusing, and just quietly struggle through it instead of flagging the problem. But I didn't have to. When you hit a wall, it's easier to just tell your boss what's going on than to sit there overheating your brain for hours. That way you can actually problem-solve together. I kept thinking, "If I ask questions, my boss will think I'm not good enough." Meanwhile my boss was probably thinking, "Why is she spending eight hours stuck instead of telling me after the first one?" Asking for clarification isn't weakness. It's just part of being professional.
Mistake #5: Poor time management
I was not managing my time properly, and it showed. I'd scroll TikTok for 3 minutes, work for 20, repeat, which meant everything took three times as long and work kept spilling into my school time and my weekends. During lectures I'd do the same thing in reverse: scroll TikTok in class, then scramble to read notes later because an assignment was due in two hours. My stress levels were unreal. The problem was never that I didn't care. It was that I was too mentally exhausted to stay in one task at a time, so I kept bouncing between all of them and doing none of them well. What actually helps: a dedicated work space (still on my to-do list) and real time blocks with real boundaries. School time is school time. Work time is work time. Nothing bleeds into a block it doesn't belong to.
Bonus mistake: I stopped prioritizing school
I had so many late submissions during this stretch that I don't fully understand how my GPA survived. Notes, studying, everything fell behind. So here's the reminder I needed then: doing an internship while you're still a full-time student is genuinely impressive, but your education and your portfolio are still the main priority. Everything else is extra credit.
The biggest thing I learned is that internships aren't just about proving you're capable. They're about learning to work, communicate, manage yourself, and grow in environments where nobody's holding your hand. Turns out the internship search really was like hunting for Easter eggs: a lot of searching, a few disappointing finds, and then, eventually, the one that was actually worth it.
See you next time!
