Top 5 mistakes that students make

Written by Rowland Mosbergen 11th September 2023

As the co-ordinator of the WEHI RCP student internship program and after helping 74 students go through the program over the last 2 years, here are the top 5 mistakes we see students make.

These top 5 things are:

1. They don’t read the documentation
2. They try to solve a problem they don’t understand
3. They wait to be told what to do
4. They don’t know how to escalate feedback
5. They don’t know how to share their knowledge

1. They don’t read the documentation

With over 50 students applying for internships at WEHI and around 20 students taken on each intake, we have had to scale and streamline our operations. This ensures that we can improve how students apply, how they get reviewed, how they are onboarded, and how they can maximise the benefit of the internship.

One of the ways we scale and streamline these processes is by documenting them through the WEHI RCP student internship program website, our student internship handbook, and our student internship onboarding document.

We have now added project wikis to some of the projects to help students understand the problem space in more detail before they choose. And we usually have presentations that help explain the projects.

Yet we consistently find that students would rather ask a question that has already been answered.

Solution: Take the time to read all the documentation available. If the documentation isn’t ordered, take the time to curate it.

2. They try to solve a problem they don’t understand

Many times students will try to solve the problem without actually understanding what the problem is and the nuances of the problem.

This is the equivalent of taking a taxi and asking the taxi driver to drive quickly when you don’t give them a destination. It doesn’t matter how fast you go if you’re heading in the wrong direction.

Solution: Take the time to understand the high-level problem and the nuances of the problem. Make sure you understand it by writing it down using your own words and diagrams and share this with the subject matter expert for confirmation.

3. They wait to be told what to do

Many students are expecting the internship to be like a course.

“Someone will give me the data and an explanation that is clear what I have to do. I will have already studied an appropriate solution and it will be easy to identify, choose the right solutions and the result will be clear-cut.”

This is not true in the real world. You might struggle to get the data. You may not get a clear explanation of a complex problem. You may not be familiar with appropriate solutions. The answer may not be clear cut.

Most of the projects are supervised in a way where we want you to direct yourself, once you understand the problem.

Solution: We want you to be creative and proactive in brainstorming solutions and prototyping how feasible those solutions are.

4. They don’t know how to escalate feedback

Many students will ask supervisors directly to solve their problem. But asking the supervisor first means that you have missed out on a chance to learn something yourself and be more independent. The idea is to become a thinker and solver of problems, not someone who does what they are told. This becomes easier if you know the problem at a high level, including the nuances of that problem.

Solution: Google first. Ask questions of your fellow team mates second. Then ask your supervisor and cc in your team mates so that everyone learns.

5. They don’t know how to share their knowledge

Many of our projects are long-term and cannot be solved by a single cohort of students. We rely on slowly building up knowledge across each cohort.

Students have learnt important knowledge several times but haven’t documented in a way that the next cohort of students can benefit from it. So, the next cohort of students get frustrated that they can’t get traction because they cannot understand what happened before at a high-level and at a technical level.

Solution: Document the general knowledge you have learned in a GitHub wiki, document your technical knowledge and daily activities in a technical diary within Sharepoint, and create a presentation that makes it easy for others to understand what it takes to continue the project.

You can find out more from the FAQ.

Conclusion

I hope that this helps you understand how you can make the most of the internship at WEHI by avoiding these mistakes.