(originally posted here∞)

I share a lot of your traits (flaws & all): very broad interests, devouring new information, solving problems when they appear without apparent regard for priority, long-term pseudo-planning without commitment, and so on. What you label as butterflies, I prefer to call "iterative depth-first search" :)

My overarching advice to you is to stay in constant communication with your mentor. Waubers is correct that you should think before you speak, but you don't sound like you have that problem. Instead, I forecast a tendency to want to solve every problem on your own. In a large organization, the extra bit of payoff in self-education is usually not worth the inefficiency of blocking the actual_job_responsibilities thread.

Staying in constant touch will also, by its nature, ensure that you have lots of short-term goals (weekly or less). Shorter timeslices means less procrastination -- just make sure it doesn't increase the costs of context switching too much. Sometimes that's unavoidable, but it sounds like they already have a specific area picked out, which for someone like you is a big advantage you should seize upon to serialize your workflow.

I would spend exactly 0 time pondering the future. Not possible, I know, but realize that at this point there's no way anything you ponder will have any relevance to your actual career. I'm working for The Man, but WRT life in general that's just the glue: the product is used to tinker with my video hobby; the location is situated where I can continue in the musical ensembles I relish; the website hosts a blog for which I'm writing broad essays on the future of culture alongside neato geekery; the pay ensures that I can do whatever I want with the bulk of my remaining lifespan. When I was an intern, this particular path didn't even exist yet -- similar ones did, but it was just as likely I'd end up in a military band (hobby = computers, culture = touring Europe, stability = position if not raw paycheck), or in grad school (extrapolate left to reader), or prone on my unfurnished floor rocking and chanting in Elvish.

[QUOTE]2) if anyone has ever been an IBM intern or co-op, or works at IBM, any pointers specifically for me?[/QUOTE]
I know couple people who have done various intern programs there. The guy who did Extreme Blue loved it; the girl who did a regular internship hated it. Of course, IBM is a ginormous company, and neither internship was in NY, so my knowledge means very little.

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