Advice on how to perform well during a virtual summer internship

Invest in a monitor (or two)

Some of these were already mentioned, but they’re what come to mind:

Communicate often with your teams. Acknowledge that you’ve received something and that you understand what’s being asked. Ask questions early. Similar to in-office internships, let your teams know if you’re working on something else for an extended period or if you have to be unavailable for some time. Normally, this would be intern events, coffee chats, client meetings, etc.

Let your team know if you’re having an issue, particularly if it’s deadline related.

Can’t agree more with the answer above about trying to figure something out, then asking for help while mentioning that you tried to figure it out. It’s fine if you have questions, but it’s not great if your team thinks you’re cruising along on something then finds out you were stuck on step one for the past 4 hours.

If you know someone in the group already, try to gey a hold of primers or a how-to / best practices guide for the group. You obviously won’t have access to any internal systems / files beforehand, but you’ll at least have heard of XYZ database or ABC internal system. This can also help uncover some subverticals if you’re in coverage and can inform some of your pre-reading if you’re so inclined.

Use the phone. Some things are just much easier to discuss via phone than exchanging 30 emails.

Make people’s lives easier. It’s hard to do at the beginning because you’ll have no idea what would make your teams’ lives easier, but you can slowly pick up things that can be helpful and avoid doing annoying things.

Source everything and comment where needed. It’s much easier for me to exclude your comment if it’s not needed than having to guess / find what’s going on if there’s something unusual in what you pulled.

Communicate with your staffer. Don’t outright turn down work when asked if you can take on another staffing. Lay out what’s on your plate and the staffer can see if you have capacity or not. Can be delicate but they’ll generally have a better idea of how much capacity you have.

Try to get a group chat with your fellow summers going. That’s a good place to ask less-than-great questions. Please ask questions of full-time people, but there are some questions that are better circulated in a more “friendly” setting of people that can’t affect your return offer.

Take initiative and ownership of projects. Not to the point where you’re overriding your team though and there are some tasks where it’s not possible.

As for pre-internship work, I’ll defer to others on taking online classes or modeling practice. If you have the time, then they certainly can’t hurt.