Hi everyone! Today, we’re piggy-backing off of Monday’s latest topic on fostering virtual mentorships. As important as it is to connect with employees and seasoned professionals at your company, it is also essential to your internship experience to connect with your intern coworkers! There is no one at the company who is in a more similar position to you than those who are also participating in your program, so follow these easy and quick steps to cultivate new friendships today…

Building Virtual Friendships…

• Say Hello! While we hope that this bit seems obvious, we encourage you to remember that, after all, every intern is in your same boat. The nerves you felt on the first day and bits of learnings that you take with you after every meeting are mirrored in their same experience. So, the first step is just to reach out and extend a simple hello! Whether this is through a GroupMe message, Microsoft Teams channel, email, or even text, it’s crucial to get ahead of the game right away and spark up a new conversation.
• Set-Up Concrete Time to Meet: Although it may be through a screen or in another virtual manner, setting up a concrete piece of time on your schedule to mimic a “coffee chat” with another intern is a vital step to actually cultivating meaningful relationships. Using this time to bounce ideas off of one another, seek feedback or help, learn about each other’s roles or goals, or just to get to know more about their personalities and lives outside of work will help you to build a friend and a coworker in the office. Especially as you begin to consider full-time opportunities, remember that these same people may very well become those that you spend most of your time with. So, navigating these potential friendships is a great way to also review your alignment with the company culture!
• Follow Up: Just as we encouraged in regards to mentorships, following up with coworkers and intern relationships is your key to success. Make sure to ask how their presentation went! How is their project coming along? Can you help connect them to a new teammate or mentor? Having a two-way relationship will help you to both extracts even greater value from the company and achieve valuable success both as it relates to networking and productivity.
• Separate Work and Fun: Finally, now that we’re almost all working from home full-time, it’s crucial to still integrate moments just for fun that help you to separate yourself from just your work. Whether this means a happy hour, new group chat to send funny messages, or another meeting outside of just work hours, creating relationships that don’t just exist from 9-5 will prove those that last and become most intrinsic to your view of the company and future career.

Remember, everyone wants to make friends at work! Initiating conversations and getting the ball rolling will not only help you stand out as a valuable candidate to your intern managers but will allow you to dive even deeper into the company culture and make new friends. So, get going today!

Missed our last article? Learn about how to create virtual mentorships here!

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