The author (not pictured) was the oldest intern in the office.
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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 questionsFrom 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.
