Tips For Balancing a Virtual Internship With School

By: Antonia Le ‘22

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, everything has gone virtual, even the good old internship. With nowhere else to go and nothing to do, I spent most of my Fall semester doing virtual work in conjunction on top of my academic studies. So, here are some quick tips for balancing a full-time course load with a part-time internship:

1) Have a designated workspace

I know, I know. This is the tip given in every “at-home productivity” article, but there’s a reason that people keep saying it! Having a set space where I tell myself that I can only do school/internship-work and nothing else enables me to be more focused and productive. 

I’ve found that working at my dinner table is really helpful. At my dinner table, my siblings and parents can see me, which means that they can see if I’m slacking off. This incentivizes staying focused and productive. Moreover, having my workspace be outside of my bedroom enables me to create a separation between my work and personal life, which helps ease my burnout. 

2) Have a designated “work time”

Sometimes, if you a big gap of empty space in your work schedule, it’s easy to say “oh I’ll do that in 30 minutes” or “I’ll do that in an hour”. However, if you keep saying that, nothing really gets done. As a result, I’ve given myself some flexible restrictions; on days where I don’t have class in the morning, I will tell myself that I need to start doing work sometime between 9-10 am. I feel like that’s a reasonable time such that I’m not beating myself up if it’s especially hard to get out of bed one day, but I also have a good few hours to get some work done before classes or Zoom meetings.

3) Create your own schedule

For my internship, I sometimes had projects that had no specific deadline, which made them easy to procrastinate on. To prevent this, I created my own deadlines. This enabled me to better plan out my days so that I could get all of my schoolwork and internship work done within a reasonable time frame. 

4) Try out different systems

I went through a lot of different systems of planning and organization before I found the right one: planners, bullet-journals, to-do lists, you name it. Sometimes you want a system of organization to work for you so badly, but it simply doesn’t. Don’t keep using a system that doesn’t work for you because that’s all you know. Instead, take some time and do some research as to ways people use to organize their days. There’s no shame in saying that you can’t bullet journal or to-do lists stress you out and trying something different instead.

For me, I bounce to a new system every few weeks. Every time I get “used to” a system of organization, I get complacent and find loopholes. I’ll make excuses for not doing anything on my to-do list, or I’ll cheat on my bullet journal by saying that I finished something when I simply started it. Switching to new techniques every so often helps keep things fresh and allows me to stay focused on what matters. 

What works for me now:

Right now, I’m super into using the Notion app. I draft a lot of my documents on it because looking at Google Docs and Microsoft Word stresses me out, and it makes it easy to create calendars and to-do lists.

One thing I also found helpful is using the 4-Quadrant planning system instead of a simple to-do list. Having a long to-do list is often overwhelming, and the 4-quadrant system helps me break things down and see what I need to prioritize.

Juggling any responsibility on top of a full course load is difficult, but not impossible. I hope that these tips helped you in some way! Good luck with all your future virtual endeavors! 

Want more from Trojans 360?

Visit Trojans 360 on Facebook & Twitter to stay up to date with more student content! You can also Ask A Trojan an anonymous question, and we’ll try to answer it in a future post. And don’t forget to follow us on Instagram!

Trojans 360 is USC’s official student-run blog. Content created by students, for students.