Getting Started for NTG Interns
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If you are new to the NTG Internship Program, welcome! If you are not and you are reading this anyway... uh, well, welcome as well?
Likely you have been directed here by NTG's internal internship documentation center as a starting point for the MangoLassi community. NTG has long focused very heavily on the important of socialization, peer review, inter-professional interactions and social media as key cornerstones of professional development and a critical component of that is our participation in communities such as MangoLassi. We will work as much as possible to post as much as possible about intern projects, work, challenges, questions and review in the community as possible. Some projects may be private or have private components, those pieces can be posted to the NTG internal Yammer platform, but by and large most everything that is done as an intern will be able to be publicly exposed and should be to allow not only for NTG review, but for public, professional peer review as well.
One of the most important aspects of the NTG Intern program is learning not only how to handle the day to day "hands on" of working in IT, but learning how to learn, where to turn for review and resources and how to become involved in your greater IT community. NTG might not always be a part of your career, but working with the greater IT community certainly will be. In IT it is so common for people to become isolated and lose a sense of center within the field, maintaining an expansive network of resources is therefore very important.
As you work through the NTG Internship program we expect you to be regularly active on MangoLassi. This means many things. Some of what is important would be:
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Reading and participating in technical threads that do not directly pertain to you. This is important so that you can learn about what challenges others are facing, see how issues are resolved, find out how others find answers, seeing what other people are using, how they are working and more. It's one of the best ways to "sit in" on many different businesses without having to go physically visit them all.
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Posting projects. You want to let the community know what project(s) you are working on. This is a great way to force you to think deeply about and write up details which alone can be very beneficial. It also allows people to pose questions, provide insight and advice before you get to far along. It also serves as a great reference point before asking for help later on.
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Asking for help. When you get stuck technically (as opposed to organizationally such as waiting for a password or other resource) you should turn first to the MangoLassi community. The sooner you get a question out there, the sooner that people can begin thinking about it and helping you. Learning how to ask good questions, and learning to ask them sooner so that other people are assisting you in parallel to you doing your own research and troubleshooting, is an important part of your internship and growth as an IT professional.
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Documenting projects. When projects are done, the community is the perfect way to "build a portfolio" so that you can showcase what you have been working on and have accomplished.
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Monitoring. By keeping your activities constantly updated in ML, it makes it far easier for your interning and mentoring team to track what you are currently doing and help to guide you, while also crowdsourcing additional guidance.
Getting Started for Interns in MangoLassi:
- Get your avatar uploaded and your profile filled out. Avatars help people to remember you and assist in establishing relationships.
- Post a quick introduction on the general welcome thread.
- Create a new thread in the "IT Careers" category and post a new thread introducing yourself at length. Make this a sort of information resume situation where you talk about your background, experience and areas of interest. What are you specifically looking to learn in your internship, where do you want to go in your career. For many interns, this might be difficult as you may not know what IT has to offer and so you will want to talk about what areas of IT you know about and have experienced, what interests you and what you do or don't like about different things that you know about within IT.
- Get signed in to ML when you start your day and stay signed in. ML should not be a "checking in" from time to time thing, but should be a continuous part of your interning day. Use it to catch up on the news, to see what people are working on, to ask questions, to respond to people, to add your own ideas, to stay engages.
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Thank you for the advice! I look forward to learning more from you
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@WrCombs said in Getting Started for NTG Interns:
Thank you for the advice! I look forward to learning more from you
As you learn - don't forget that sometimes you have to question. There have been countless times that I have 'taught' something only to learn of a different and sometimes better way of doing the same task.
