Regretting TI internship
I came into this engineering internship excited to learn and contribute. Instead, I left disappointed by what I experienced.
There was virtually no onboarding, no structured training, and no clear technical ownership of my projects. I repeatedly asked for documentation, architecture overviews, or any material that would help me understand the products I was working on, but I was largely told to Google datasheets or find answers on my own.
My manager was new to the technology I was working on, so many of my technical questions couldn’t be answered directly and I was frequently redirected to other engineers. This left me trying to piece together information from different people, many of whom weren’t familiar with my project’s overall goals. Even one week when everyone left for an event , my manger told me to wait until next week when the rest came back to answer my questions. My manger has no experience in the area we are in and seemed to get hired based on knowing a powerful person in group. Add to that people quitting due to the toxic culture and their work getting dumped on the ones left.
My projects had no well-defined specifications or success criteria. Every time I got close to finishing, the scope changed again. It often felt like I was expected to deliver without anyone agreeing on what “done” actually meant.
I consistently asked for feedback because I wanted to improve. Instead, I rarely received direct technical guidance or constructive coaching. I was often left feeling dismissed rather than supported, and some interactions came across to me as intimidating rather than encouraging. That’s not an environment where interns can develop confidence or learn effectively.
Knowledge sharing was inconsistent, and collaboration often felt discouraged. Instead of engineers taking the time to explain design decisions or walk through their reasoning, conversations frequently ended with “that’s wrong” without explaining why. That teaches very little.
This wasn’t my first internship and I am doing my masters, so I have a basis for comparison. In my previous internship, I had clear mentorship, supportive technical leadership, and received two full-time offers after my final presentation. That experience showed me how much good leadership and a healthy engineering culture matter. Looking back , I regret turning down all my other offers for this.
The technology was exciting, but an internship is about more than the product. It’s about mentorship, accountability, communication, and helping the next generation of engineers succeed. Unfortunately, I did not experience those things here.