2 Key Questions To Ask Before Joining A Startup As An Intern

Are you considering joining a startup as an intern? If so, you need to make sure that you're joining a team and environment that will be conducive to your own personal growth.

As you're going through your interview process, here are two key questions you need to get answered before moving forward with accepting a position. 

The term startup is very loosely used, and it can refer to a company with a single founder and no employees, or it can refer to a company that is several years old with well over 100 employees. Because of this, the responses you receive to the following two questions will vary widely. 

Ultimately, you need to analyze the responses from each startup and determine whether you're being positioned for success or positioned for failure. 

Let's now jump into the specific questions to get answered.

#1: What Will Your Support Network Look Like? 

You're not going to get the answer to this question by actually asking this exact question. I know that's confusing, but you need to ask a variety of other questions to then be able to answer this question for yourself.

For example, you could ask...

What's the process for interns to get help with any questions?

This question is important because you need to understand who exactly is going to be available to you. And, when will they be available to you. Will you be contacting someone directly? Will you be posting to a Slack channel when you have questions? What happens if nobody responds to your question on Slack? The last thing you want is to be stuck on a problem with no response from anybody on your team for 2+ days. This is especially problematic if you're working in a remote internship. For in-person internships, it's much easier to get up out of your chair and walk to someone else's desk without having to wait for a response. 

Do interns participate in any daily or weekly meetings?

Does the startup hold daily stand-ups? Do they have weekly or bi-weekly sprint planning meetings? How about any other meetings? These are all important to understand because this will hint at how structured and organized the startup is. More structure is better than no structure, but too much structure can also be problematic and overbearing.

What you're trying to avoid is joining a startup where you'll feel isolated with no (or an inconsistent) support network within the company.

The startup is hiring you to do a job, so you shouldn't expect the startup to hold your hand through every single step. You need to attempt to solve problems on your own before going to your team members. This is an important thing to remember. 

#2: What Will You Really Be Working On? 

Let's be real... most interns are not going to join a startup and lead the charge on some transformational technology. Often times, interns will come in and work on unglamorous unit tests or the tasks nobody else wants to work on. 

Because of this, you need to find out what you'll really be working on. Just because the company works on a modern tech stack with a sweet UI, doesn't mean you'll actually be working on what you see with the startup's product. 

Now, this doesn't mean you shouldn't take a job just because you may be working on "unglamorous" tasks, but it at least will ensure you have appropriately set expectations. 

To get to the bottom of this, here's a question you can ask...

What type of project or tasks will I work on during my internship?

Pretty straightforward, right? No need to beat around the bush. Just come right out and ask the question. Now, if you get a vague answer, you can then dig a little deeper and ask more specifically about tasks you could work on. For instance, if you're told that "you'd work on our product backend," this doesn't really tell you much. That's when you could follow that up by asking for a specific example of something you might work on. 

You're not asking these questions because you think you're too good to work on certain things. You're asking these questions because you legitimately want to know what you're going to be working on. 

A company that is disorganized may not even know what you're going to be working on. They may say things such as "we may have you..." or "we'd like to have you..." or "we've talked about possibly having you..." and so on. These are all wishy-washy responses with no clear objective for what you'll be doing. In these cases, they're just looking for a warm body to knock out tasks. And, they may not even know if you have the skills to complete those tasks.  

In this case, you would then need to determine if you're up for the uncertainty that this environment would bring.  

What Next? 

The bottom line is that you should want to find an internship with a company that is going to put you in a position to succeed. The way you succeed is by having a great support network within the organization and by ensuring there's a clear understanding of how you can best help the company during your internship. 

It doesn't matter the size of the startup either. You can find success at startups small and large. But, you can also find disarray at startups small and large.

The last thing I'll add is to not shy away from asking questions. And, make sure you're asking the questions from a place of curiosity and not a place of ego. 

The best of luck with your startup internship!