Nicholas Barry

I just calculated interns' hours as full-time equivalent (FTE) employees. If you're not familiar with this, it means adding up all their hours per week and dividing by 40 (for a 40-hour work week), which can give you the equivalent number of full-time employees. So we have 16 interns right now, but only two are genuinely full time. All their hours together come to 4.78 FTE interns! I think it will be closer to 6 during July.

Here's a graph of my FTE intern management experience over time:

My interns, apparently, aren't as wild about initiative as I thought they'd be. It turns out they want a bit more structure.

We recently had an Intern Retreat - we got all the interns together to talk about how things were going, and to ask them to suggest improvements. A few quick findings:

• Everyone seems to really like the program - they had plenty of improvements to suggest, but hardly any complaints. I'm always open to complaints, so I don't think they were just biting their tongues out of fear.
• Interns like the freedom they're given to dream up their own projects, but also really want some preapproved projects to choose from if they just want to get started on something.
• Experienced interns really wanted more opportunities to act as leaders and help mentor newer interns. I've been wanting to start a mentoring program for a while, but feared that the older interns would view it as a hassle. Au contraire!

I'll write another post soon about the intern mentoring I've started up. I have also begun an Internships page of this website to describe what I've learned about starting and running an internship program. For now, I'll start with my biggest surprise, which was that most interns seemed to want more vetted projects.

When I dreamed up the idea of ownership initiatives, I thought the biggest appeal would be that interns could think up their own projects. One of the aspects of my job that I've always valued the most has been the freedom to initiate a project I thought would benefit the office, and I imagined interns would clamor at the opportunity to do the same. So I developed the ownership initiatives around the idea that interns would propose an idea, then investigate how to turn that idea into a feasible project.

Well, I guess I shouldn't have been surprised that things don't always go as smoothly as I imagined. There are at least three things that stand in the way of my idealized vision:

• Many interns - even motivated, creative interns - don't come in with a good understanding of what sorts of projects our office will want to take on.
• Roadblocks, often completely unexpected, can derail good ideas, which is frustrating for interns.
• Most of our interns are energetic and don't want to spend weeks investigating a potential project before getting started - they want to get started now.

What interns need is a pool of vetted projects they can get started on immediately, which have been cleared of roadblocks, and which I know will further the cause of our office (providing assistance to constituents, and providing a communication channel between constituents and Senator Steinberg).

The ownership initiatives now have a slightly different focus. Instead of trumpeting the benefits of being able to work on projects that interns can design on their own, we emphasize the appeal of having ownership (responsibility and commitment) over a project. We help new interns find places on existing projects. I spend time making sure projects aren't getting stuck. What I still need to implement is a list of fully-vetted projects with notes on how to get started.

Beyond that, I talk to interns about ideas they may want to pursue on their own. I know that there are interns who want to design projects of their own, and I want to make that possible. But I also realize that not everyone wants to invent a completely new program; they just want the opportunity to contribute something of value for which they will be recognized.