An entrepreneur can’t know exactly what he or she will be doing next week. Nonetheless, one can organize and execute a plan within an acceptable range of chaos. I recently experienced this while having the privilege to intern at UN&UP, a biotech start-up that develops advanced medical devices to treat underserved conditions (https://www.unandup.com/).

Navigating unexpected changes starts with a flexible plan. Before starting work, the company gave me four tasks and an expected timeline for each. With some guidance, I sketched a blueprint for the most immediate tasks and set to work. “This plan will change,” I was warned. “because we don’t know whether such-and-such will be useful to the company. You’ll have to discover that. We also don’t know how long it will take you to do such-and-such, so don’t take the deadlines too seriously.” Good advice. Not four days into my work, one task was completely replaced by another. Nearing the end of my ten weeks, I almost didn’t have time to finish the fourth task. But with a plan, some healthy flexibility, and valuable mentorship, I delivered the four items.

If I didn’t know anything about the company, I would have expected both the uncertainty of start-up life and the confusion of an intern left to fend for myself. Not so. In fact, from my introductory interview I knew that this would not be my experience at UN&UP. Each intern, I was told, would receive not only a scheduled task list, but also main points-of-contact and weekly check-ins. This impressed me. The initial task schedule, though subject to change, guided my freedom to choose when and how to accomplish the tasks. Additionally, I could always ask questions and get feedback from any member of the company. I discovered two valuable qualities that I had not previously considered essential to entrepreneurship success: structure and mentorship. And I mean a kind of mentorship that extends beyond just the relationship between host and intern. Team members can teach their specialty to others in the team, and experienced entrepreneurs can mentor those less experienced. Entrepreneurship is membership in a community if you choose to make it so. I experienced a community with a culture built on organized expectations with feedback from mentors and assumptions that plans change.

Entrepreneurs may not know what next week will require, but flexible planning and mentored independence helped me feel stable while I was an intern. In my recent experience, having a suggested task schedule helped tame my perfectionist tendencies. So, I considered how to apply this experience to another activity fraught with uncertainty, in which my confidence has been dwindling: my thesis project. As a late-third-year doctoral student in Computational and Systems Biology, I process biological data in previously unexplored ways. I don’t know which parts of the project will succeed this week nor which parts I’ll be working on for months to come, so the project can feel a little chaotic. Using the summer internship plan to template a new strategy for my Ph.D. work, I now feel more confident to achieve milestones and someday — a real, planned someday — graduate.

Nick Jensen is a Ph.D. student in the Developmental Biology Department at Washington University who wrote this blog as part of his Pivot 314 Fellowship.