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An 8-week long internship for aspirational students. |
Every summer we bring in a few students to Obvious to see what it's like to work at a digital product design studio. This will typically be an 8 week long paid program where students come in and get their hands dirty solving a tricky problem (with some excellent mentorship, of course).
By the end of the 8 weeks, we hope to have created a meaningful experience that not only involved a steep learning curve but also challenged them to work faster in a collaborative environment.
At Obvious, we’re always looking to make our studio more interesting and diverse. We believe that by bringing in young designers who are willing to take risks, are itching to build something exciting and can challenge our thinking, we will continue to grow into a more well rounded team. By helping you learn, we hope to become better ourselves.
Our aim here is to nurture ambitious students in their journey towards becoming exceptional engineers and designers by providing them with the guidance & tools required to hone their craft and refine their thinking.
While the internship journey looks different for each individual, the larger structure remains the same.
New faces, new processes and a new environment can get a bit overwhelming early on. To reduce this anxiety, we've created a simple but structured on-boarding process that helps the candidate settle in with ease.
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Milestone 1
At the end of week 1, the intern does a short talk introducing themself, their life journey and their first week at Obvious.
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In the beginning of the second week, the intern and their mentor align on the scope and process of their problem statement. This is constructed keeping in mind that it needs to be achievable by the intern with a 7 week timeframe. The remaining part of the week is spent refining the problem definition and coming up with an initial hypothesis.
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Milestone 2
At the end of week 2, the intern presents their work from the discovery exercise, followed up by a detailed written feedback by the team.
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The candidate refines the initial hypothesis through a series of investigative exercises.
- For Design, these exercises could be primary and secondary research, experience mapping, co-creation with potential users etc.
- For Engineering, these exercises could be planning stories/tasks, estimation, architecture, spikes, tracer bullets etc.
The outcome of this stage is a set of well defined problems with an equally strong set of directions.
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Milestone 3
At the end of week 4, the intern presents their work from the investigation exercise, followed up by a detailed written feedback by the team. The mentor then provides the candidate with actionable feedback based on which the intern formulates their next steps.
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Using our design/engineering frameworks, along with some guidance from the mentor, the intern translates the direction from the previous stage into a well thought out, 4-week execution plan. For the next 4 weeks, the candidate builds out the solution iteratively, seeking feedback and counsel from their mentor and team at a regular cadence.
The final week of the internship is spent documenting the project story and timeline in the form of a concise, well articulated, digital thesis. This will then be presented on the last day of the internship during the last town-hall.
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Milestone 4
At the end of week 8, the intern presents their work along with some key learnings from the internship.
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