The following article is part of a series of articles about our NerdWallet Summer Internship program. Anlin Chen shared their experience as an software engineer intern. If you are curious about joining NerdWallet as an intern or full-time employee, please apply for one of our open positions!

Mentors are an amazing resource for practical advice, technical guidance, and candid feedback. They are especially crucial in the workplace, where they help with first-day setup issues, answer “dumb” programming questions, and push for your overall career growth. But when a global pandemic limits all your social interactions to be on Zoom, it can be easy to feel a disconnect and lack of support when all your conversations are through a screen.

Coming into my internship at NerdWallet, I knew that I had to make the most of it. This internship was my final one before graduation so it was important for me to develop my technical skills and to learn as much as possible. Unfortunately, a remote internship introduced a whole new realm of challenges. How do you get questions answered when you can no longer roll your chair over to someone’s desk? How can you interact and learn from others when lunchroom conversations are no longer feasible? Hopefully, this blog post can provide some advice.

You can find mentorship in a variety of sources. It can be a senior at work, a stranger from LinkedIn whose article piqued your interest, or even a close friend you look up to. Mentorship can also vary in duration, depending on what suits the mentee’s needs. I am going to focus specifically on long-term, remote, mentor-mentee relationships. As a part of the NerdWallet internship program, each intern is paired with a mentor on their team, who is typically a non-manager. My mentor this summer was Stephanie. She really went above and beyond to help me grow as an engineer. These were the key points that worked well for us:

Consistent mentorship sessions

It is important to establish a consistent meet-up schedule with your mentor. In an internship setting, this could mean 10-minute check-ins daily, or 1-hour sessions weekly. Find something that works for both of you and stick to it. My mentor and I had 45-minute Zoom calls every Tuesday. It worked well for us because we enjoyed having longer periods to talk.

Consistent meetups are great for your mentor to track your progress and keep up to date with your work. In a remote work environment, this is especially valuable. It can be hard for a mentor to understand how they can help when they cannot physically see your day-to-day. Additionally, these meetups are the best time for you to ask questions, learn, and receive feedback. The more frequent the sessions, the more beneficial the relationship is. However, it is good to find a balance where the meetups do not make your schedules overwhelming.

Pair programming

If you are working in engineering, pair programming with your mentor is one of the best ways to develop your technical skills. These sessions can either be ad hoc or at scheduled intervals.

In a remote workplace setting, the best way to become familiar with a new codebase is to pair program with someone. Once you have been walked through the code architecture, been given some debugging tips, and have worked on your first ticket with supervision, you will feel much more confident in future tasks. I enjoy pair programming with my mentor whenever I encounter a difficult bug I cannot resolve. It is helpful to be able to jump on a call and use my mentor as a “rubber duck”. Even when it comes to tickets I am more familiar with, it is great to work together so that I can ask questions about the codebase as I scour through it. Additionally, one thing I find valuable in my learning is pair programming with my mentor on a ticket that they are working on. It is super interesting to watch a seasoned engineer solve more challenging problems.

Impromptu hangouts

It can be easy to feel lonely or under-supported when working remotely. Something that helped me have a great remote internship experience was impromptu calls with my mentor. We would spontaneously spin up Zoom calls during work hours and just hangout. Often, we would sit in silence and just do our work, but sometimes we would take the time to chat and talk about random things in our lives (like one of her chickens getting stuck in a feeding tube). This made the remote experience way more bearable. It brought back the feeling of sitting with your friends in a library and studying together. Most importantly, this helped develop our mentor-mentee relationship into a friendship.

Building a connection with a mentor remotely can be difficult. I know that I had my anxiety about receiving mentorship at a distance when I first started this internship. Reinforcing the points I have mentioned above, the best way to create a connection with anyone is to just hop on a call.