Ask HN: What tips do you have for interns?

What are things that you strongly dislike about interns or something that you wish you would be able to tell an intern you know? I currently am an intern and want to have the best experience that I can, as well as give my employer/co-workers the smallest headache possible. I want to be an asset not a burden. (If it helps, I'm currently working as a Mobile Development Intern)

Easy to list train wrecks and how to avoid them. Harder to list advice that isn't related to train wrecks.

The worst intern-specific train wrecks I've seen involve the intern's keeper(s) not having an accurate view of the interns abilities.

The worst young-person-specific train wrecks I've seen involve young office employees having an incorrectly high assessment of their office culture knowledge. Nothing I've seen on TV and movies about office culture is useful or enlightening. Culture, as in local traditions for interpersonal relations and local shared group priorities.

I'm an intern right now and these are some things I'm trying to do:

1) Work - we're young right now and don't have too many commitments so why not put in some extra time to excel at your main project and even take up some side projects. It's okay to stay in the office later than most other older engineers.

2) Networking/Side projects - talk to other people in the firms, see what they're working on and offer help if needed. These might be the same people/team that may hire you for full-time one day

3) Learn - Pick at people's brains, I know at my firm most people are willing to take some time to help me. Anything that can be found on stackoverflow or a book just use that but it may help to go over some design/implementation stuff with other more experienced engineers.

4) Software - Learn from the design and testing flows of the company. Try to separate yourself from the way you write software in class or for yourself and understand the way software is developed at a production level, from test-driven development to properly deploying your software.

Uhh not in public. I did a lot of dumb young-person-train-wreck myself as a youth. As analogy it all boils down to things like how we relate to fellow students (or work alone) in school is mostly not how we communicate with adults at the office.

"This is bullshit" in the source code comments makes your TA laugh and is appropriate at school, but at work the execs and customers who get source access don't think its funny especially if you make fun of the customer. Some of the most trivial basic management skills that often aren't applied in school at all, but are applied at work, like compliment in public and blame in private. At school in algo class culturally all that matters is getting the best O(n) behavior because thats kind of the point of the class, possibly work culture is not so interested especially if there is a basic physics reason or financial regulation reason n can never exceed 3. (edited to emphasize its not that these specific examples were right or wrong, but that it wasn't "gotten" that they were wrong at that work team, but the new guy genuinely, incorrectly, thought it was a cultural fit)

Its not so much being right or wrong in an absolute sense the problem is thinking they know the culture better than they do leading to innocent inaccurate behavior decisions.