I recently quit my full time role to take an unpaid internship that eventually earned me my dream job.
I learned so much from the opportunity to start from scratch, yet my most useful lessons came not from management, but from my fellow interns — some of whom were a decade younger than me.
Headlines often paint Gen Z as being the most challenging generation to work with. But that wasn’t my experience at all. In fact, I found them to be perfectly practical and rather inspirational.
Working alongside them as a 31-year-old with nearly a decade of experience made me wonder whether some of what gets criticized as weakness is actually a paradigm shift toward emotional intelligence.
Here are two lessons my fellow Gen Z interns taught me that made me question which aspects of professionalism I’d learned were wisdom and which were toxic work-culture conditioning.
Ask the big questions
From day one, I noticed their willingness to ask The Big Questions.
Makes sense, right? Interns are supposed to ask questions. But while all of us asked the usual procedural questions, I noticed that the youngest in our crowd were always ready to skip superficialities and go straight for the jugular.
“Why?” they asked often.
They genuinely wanted to know and offer their two cents.
Why are we doing it like this? Why is this the process?
If a particular procedure came off as convoluted or confusing, they asked, “Why do it this way when we could just do it that way?” When a procedure came off as redundant or lacking in value, they asked, “…why bother?”
After working in professional settings for years, I was used to upper management being closed to conversations that go beyond doling out instructions. I realized I hadn’t asked a “why” question beyond the interview stage in a long time.
Gen Z reminded me that questions are tiny signals that convey: while we trust our team to guide us, business as usual may not be the only path to success.
Questioning helps keep the core philosophy behind what we do at the forefront of our minds, so we can operate more effectively and be more aligned with our overall mission.
Protect time with boundaries
As the internship workload increased, I noticed that my fellow Gen Z interns fiercely protected their time. They cared about their work and worked hard, but when the clock ticked 5 p.m., they were gone.
They took their work hours literally.
I remember when I got my first job, a Xillennial coworker told me to say goodbye to my free time. Several people in the company had the same mantra: working on weekends was the price of a promotion someday.
The interns I personally connected with? Well, I learned quickly that when they were out, they were out and gone. They were balancing school, personal obligations, the internship itself, and a social life, too.
They knew how to block their time.
They set boundaries. They had lunch, clocked out on time, and communicated when they needed a brain break. No, they weren’t lazy; they simply embodied work-life balance.
Meanwhile, I was juggling nine different freelance roles, building a small business on the side, and still tediously rearranging my bare-minimum sleep schedule so that, if I needed to stay late, I could.
Gen Z reminded me that constant availability is not proof of dedication. Answering an email in thirty seconds is nice, but not an indicator of commitment. Taking on extra work that carried beyond hours just to say “yes” was not a strength, especially if it came at the cost of rest.
The skills behind the lessons
My takeaway isn’t that Gen Z has everything figured out. None of us does.
My takeaway is that Gen Z taught me an invaluable lesson: curiosity, in the form of big questions, and self-respect, in the form of boundary-setting, are essential skills.
Asking questions creates understanding, and boundaries create sustainability. Together, they create a work environment with clarity, respect, and high performance.
And I know these skills can be stunted once we begin ascending into large-company roles because by the end of the internship, my fellow interns taught me one last critical lesson: I used to have these same skills once upon a time. But I’d unlearned them over the years, thinking they wouldn’t serve me well.
I was wrong. Gen Z’s emotional intelligence turned our internship into a flourishing ecosystem, and now, I apply these skills wherever I go.
Jackie Garcia-Morales is an author, publicist, and literary agent based in New Jersey. Connect on Linkedin.
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