Turning my Google UX internship into a full-time position
By: Ricardo Hernández Pérez
Tags: Careers, Jobs, Work, Internships, Tech

Internships are an incredible opportunity to grow your professional and interpersonal skills. Some internships can act as launching pads for a career within the company and beyond. Many interns start their internships with one goal in mind: securing the coveted return offer.

For many students, the pressure to perform well and land the return offer comes with high anxiety and stress levels. I embarked on my Google internship journey aspiring towards receiving a full-time offer and, while at times stressful, having this long term goal motivated me to excel at work throughout the summer.

With the summer well underway, and many of you interning remotely, I’m sure that landing the full-time offer has in the very least crossed your mind. I mean, how great would it be to land a full-time job in these uncertain times? With that said, I want to share a list of actionable items I’ve derived from my internship experience at Google to help you turn your summer internship into a full-time gig. Because everyone’s internships will differ, I’m going to frame these steps in the broadest sense possible to reframe them accordingly.

As I mentioned before, the conversion process differs across companies, professions, and industries. For example, the conversion interviews’ format and topics as a UX Design intern at Google differed from my engineer counterparts. As you might have inferred, Google’s conversion process involves interviewing, whereas, other companies, extend return offers based solely on your internship performance. Nevertheless, the conversion process at Google was the same across most intern groups involving the following (in order): work performance & manager evaluation, two conversion interviews, hiring committee approval, and finally, the team matching process.

With all that said, I’m dividing the list into two sections — team-related pointers and extracurriculars. While your internship projects are crucial to your final evaluation, the work and connections you make outside of your internship project can prove invaluable in the conversion preparation process, and your future career.

Team-Related Action Items

This list is all about excelling within your project area, building relationships, and showcasing your work ethic. These steps helped me build rapport with my colleagues and demonstrate my contributions as a potential full-time team member.

✅ Connect with your colleagues

Hopefully, you’ve already checked this item off your list since your internship is probably underway. Otherwise, now is the best time to do it.

In my first meeting with my internship manager, she encouraged me to take the time to schedule one on one meetings with my colleagues to get a better sense of the product goals, the UX and team culture, and introduce myself alongside my career goals.

Meeting with your colleagues is an excellent opportunity to dig deeper into their roles and get a sense of their business goals. If you are talking to team members within your function, ask them about the team culture, their daily work life, and share your interests and goals. These meetings will help you build connections and helps demonstrate your interest in the team.

At Google, a lot of the interns receive return offers from their former internship teams. Therefore, it is never too early or too late to start building relationships and getting your name out there. If anything, I wish I had taken the time to meet more colleagues in those first weeks.

✅ Get to Know Your Manager

Think of your manager as your closest liaison throughout your internship. Taking the time to establish a relationship of openness and honesty allowed me to keep a fluid line of communication and feedback with her that never felt uncomfortable.

To nurture this relationship, begin by scheduling weekly one on one meetings with your manager. You need to assess your manager’s personality from the start so you can better engage them. Both of my managers and I had a very informal relationship, so I always felt comfortable sharing my problems and concerns with them.

However, other managers prefer to keep formal relationships. I’ve known interns who prepped for their manager syncs beforehand with detailed agendas and meeting goals. Other interns I’ve known sent weekly recaps of their goals and achievements to their managers to keep them in the loop with their work progress.

Regardless of your communication style or work approach, your manager will likely play a key role in your evaluations and, therefore, decide whether you get a conversion offer. Consequently, you must be proactively documenting your work and communicating with them regularly. Remember, you should not wait for your manager to schedule meetings with you. Take the initiative and foster this relationship as if you were a full-time employee already.

✅ Showcase a strong work ethic

Understanding intern expectations at your company is critical to doing well. For example, at Google, interns are treated like full-time employees and work on real projects. Therefore, you should be performing with a full-time employee mindset, and your work ethic should reflect that.

At Google, you can interview with various teams and, hopefully, you have a genuine interest in your team’s product area. Assuming so, share your passion and curiosity with your team. If your colleagues are under the impression that you’re genuinely passionate about the product area, they’ll be more likely to ask you to come back.

You can showcase interests by asking questions about the product, sharing ideas, digging into the projects and team structure, asking how the product generates revenue, taking on side projects, etc. A great platform to ask these questions is your one on one meetings with your colleagues and team jams. For example, during my internship, I volunteered to make a poster for an internal job fair, which was a great way to showcase my graphic design skills, add a side project to my internship portfolio, and get to know people outside of my team.

Timelines, collaboration, coordination, self-sufficiency, passion, and excellent communication are all skills that will help you convey to your team that you can succeed as a full-time colleague. At many companies, promotions are given based on whether you perform at the following level in your career ladder. Moreover, if hired at an entry-level, you need to demonstrate that you are working at an intermediate caliber before promotion. Keep this in mind throughout your internship and ask yourself: am I performing at a full-time employee level of expectations?

Extracurricular Action Items

This list is about exploring opportunities beyond your team and internship project, developing a network of mentors, and developing interpersonal and leadership skills by sharing your knowledge and experience with others.

✅ Network beyond your team

Getting to know your colleagues is one piece of the networking puzzle. However, as an intern, you have access to countless individuals throughout your company. Think about your intern badge similarly to a student ID. Your student ID gets you into places and discounts not afforded to the general public. The intern card works the same — by introducing yourself as an intern, you will find people are more willing to have coffee or meet with you that might’ve otherwise been too busy.

Many companies also have buddy or mentor programs that place you with colleagues outside of your internship team. These groups range from diversity and inclusion related communities to professional mentorship initiatives. Extracurricular groups provide another venue to meet colleagues across the company, learn about their work, and get an insight into their teams. Likewise, these groups can serve as support communities that can help you further your career goals and provide insight into a particular aspect of the company culture you may want to learn more about before deciding to join full-time.

Beyond professional opportunities and career growth, these programs allow you to discuss your internship experience with colleagues outside your direct team. Having a mentor outside of your team is an excellent opportunity to share concerns and receive advice from someone not directly related to your internship evaluations. As we will discuss further down in the article, these new connections can also prove invaluable in helping you prepare for your conversion interviews and transition to full-time.

✅ Prepare for conversion

Depending on where you’re interning, you may have to go through an interview process before converting to full-time. While your internship project, your manager, and colleagues are great resources to help prepare you for your interviews, I found practicing with colleagues outside of my team just as valuable.

Leverage the network that you’ve built up throughout your internship and hone your interview skills. Ask for practice coding challenges, whiteboarding exercises, and behavioral interviews to develop and grow these skills from people who have firsthand experience interviewing others. Regardless of whether you have an interview conversion process or not, these practice sessions can help you with other companies’ interviews down the line.

Also, keep a record of all the work that you’ve done. Document the events that you’ve attended, the independent projects you’ve pursued, and the impact you’ve had throughout your internship. Prepare a deck with all of your accomplishments and share that with your team and potentially with your interviewers. Treat your internship as a portfolio and a pitch deck that you can share with your team at the end of the internship.

✅ Teach & lead

Think of your internship as an extensive system full of nodes and networks that you can impact. Your team is one node within a more extensive network that you can explore. Therefore, taking the time to explore opportunities beyond your team can showcase how your interests scale beyond your product area and have company-wide impact.

There are many entry points to exploring the world beyond your internship team. Some of them we already touched on, such as potential mentorship programs and extracurricular communities. To better understand the reach and influence as a student intern, it is critical to acknowledge how much knowledge and insight you have accrued through previous work experience and your academic career.

At my Adobe internship, I had the opportunity to collaborate with a coding initiative teaching high school students to code. I received an invitation to speak about the UX process and participate in a panel to answer college and landing internships questions.

Opportunities like these are great platforms to showcase your leadership skills and your desire to teach and share your experiences. A willingness to teach is an invaluable skill that translates easily to your everyday work life as a full-time employee and can showcase the positive attitude and spirit you would bring to your team. Every company is different, but at Google, this would fall under the often ambiguous term of “Googleyness.” I am very inspired by this Maya Angelou quote and use it as a guiding life principle:

When you learn, teach, when you get, give.

Don’t let being a student or an intern keep you from teaching and sharing what you know. These experiences will help develop your interpersonal and communication skills but, most importantly, sharing and teaching are great ways to enrich yours and others’ lives.