Self-Management II: Managing Yourself
Always be doing something. Know what that something should be.
There is no downtime
In a professional office, there is no equivalent of the gap between classes. If you have finished your assigned work and are waiting for the next task, that waiting is your responsibility to fill — not your project manager's. Go ask for something. If your PM doesn't have anything, ask another PM. If no one has billable work, find something productive to contribute to the office: filing precedent images, cleaning up shared asset libraries, reviewing a project file you haven't worked on. Let your PM know you're doing non-billable work, then do it well.
The intern who sits quietly at their desk waiting to be told what to do next is noticed. So is the one who seeks out the next opportunity before being asked. Only one presents real value.
Advocate for experience
The experiences that will define your co-op year are not always the ones you're assigned. Ask to sit in on client meetings. Ask to join site visits, punch list walks, tree tagging, construction observation. Ask to attend budget discussions and staffing meetings if appropriate. If you don't ask, you won't be invited — not because anyone is withholding the experience, but because busy professionals default to the path of least coordination.
A student who asks to observe a client presentation and then mentions something specific they learned from watching it is the student who gets invited to the next one. Demonstrated interest creates opportunity.
On overtime
If you are an hourly employee — as most co-op students and interns are — do not work overtime without explicit approval from your project manager first. Unapproved overtime creates billing problems and, at some firms, signals poor time management rather than dedication. Always ask.
Design is rarely a forty-hour-a-week profession. Occasional long weeks are part of the reality of deadline-driven project work. But regularly working over forty-five hours should not become the norm. If it does, it's worth understanding why — and approaching it constructively.
If overtime is becoming a pattern, don't suffer quietly. Go to your project manager and ask: "I've been consistently over forty-five hours for the past few weeks. I want to stay efficient and profitable for the projects I'm on — can we look at what's driving the hours and whether there's a way to structure the work differently?" That's a team-first question, not a complaint.
As a full-time, salaried employee, the overtime dynamic shifts. Salaried positions may not include overtime pay, and expectations around hours vary significantly by firm and project load. The same principle applies: don't accept chronic overwork in silence. Understand why it's happening and address it professionally.