Exit Intern Mode: Enter Career Era : A Gen Z Guide to Winning the Work Game in the AI Era

by Patrick Sutton

A real-world guide to leveling up after the internship ends.

You wrapped the internship. You showed up, took notes, survived Slack, maybe even crushed a few projects. But now what?

Exit Intern Enter Career Mode is the career-launching playbook you didn’t know you needed—built for interns, early-career pros, and Gen Z go-getters navigating life after the badge swipe ends. No fluff. No outdated advice.
Just the real talk, digital tools, and creative strategies to help you turn that internship into a launchpad.

Inside, you’ll learn how

Build post-intern momentum (even if you didn’t get an offer)

Use AI to update your résumé, pitch yourself, and map your career path

Craft a personal brand that’s more than just a LinkedIn post

Find mentors, land side gigs, and make career moves with clarity

Redefine success on your terms—not your feed’s

This isn’t your parents’ career guide.

It’s short, smart, and built for the bold. Because the internship was only the intro—and your real story starts now.

8 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 5, 2025

About the author

I studied under prominent deconstructionists, feminists, marxists, and other -ists and learned very little except that it's not very nice to become an ist. It took me years to recover from theory. I then practiced law for a while, did residential design and construction for a while, got married and started a family, practiced law again, then took up the pen.

I had toyed with a story idea at the intersection of physics and genetics for some time, but it was not until Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science (http://www.wolframscience.com) came out a few years ago that I found suitable scientific underpinnings for the characters and plot line I had been developing in my head. Everything snapped into focus when I read Wolfram's ideas about cellular automata, the simple programs that are capable of creating systems of great complexity.

I began writing every day in 2007. I write every morning before I go to my day job, then write or edit -- depending on how fried I am -- another shift in the evening after my wife and I get the kids to bed.