This is part of an ongoing series of posts about creating and strengthening an internship program. The posts are compiled on the Internships page.
If you go about recruitment and interviewing well, you will make your management job considerably easier by choosing someone who does not need much hand-holding. This does not mean that you won’t need to manage at all, though. There are several important principles and techniques for managing effectively.
Prepare in advance: Create a list of projects and tasks your intern(s) can work on. Interns will quickly lose enthusiasm for an internship if they feel underutilized – even faster than if you give them nothing but grunt work. Make sure you can keep your interns busy and productive.
Create teams of interns: If you take on more than one intern at a time, form them into a team (or teams) to work together on projects. This increases morale significantly, encourages mentoring by the more experienced intern, and stimulates the interns’ creativity and problem-solving abilities. They will solve more problems on their own, and you will spend less time answering simple questions.
These teams can be cross-functional (e.g., including people with different skill sets, such as a designer and a business major), but they need not be if you have multiple interns from the same background.
Assign responsibilities, not just tasks: Interns want the opportunity to take responsibility for a project or goal, and will best be able to exercise their creativity and skill if you give them some freedom to decide how best to accomplish their goal. In one of our offices, we assign intern teams a project to accomplish. We consult with them initially about how best to accomplish the goal, then ask them to discuss it, and come back to us with ideas of their own. We often find that they have thought of things that hadn’t occurred to us. We expect them to report back to us frequently about their progress so we can make sure they are on track, but are often pleasantly surprised to find that they have made more progress than we expected them to make.
Assigning responsibilities requires some trust, and it is best to ease into this practice by first assigning projects that are a little bit forgiving of errors and missteps.
If you go about recruitment and interviewing well, you will make your management job considerably easier by choosing someone who does not need much hand-holding. This does not mean that you won’t need to manage at all, though. There are several important principles and techniques for managing effectively.
Prepare in advance: Create a list of projects and tasks your intern(s) can work on. Interns will quickly lose enthusiasm for an internship if they feel underutilized – even faster than if you give them nothing but grunt work. Make sure you can keep your interns busy and productive.
Create teams of interns: If you take on more than one intern at a time, form them into a team (or teams) to work together on projects. This increases morale significantly, encourages mentoring by the more experienced intern, and stimulates the interns’ creativity and problem-solving abilities. They will solve more problems on their own, and you will spend less time answering simple questions.
These teams can be cross-functional (e.g., including people with different skill sets, such as a designer and a business major), but they need not be if you have multiple interns from the same background.
Assign responsibilities, not just tasks: Interns want the opportunity to take responsibility for a project or goal, and will best be able to exercise their creativity and skill if you give them some freedom to decide how best to accomplish their goal. In one of our offices, we assign intern teams a project to accomplish. We consult with them initially about how best to accomplish the goal, then ask them to discuss it, and come back to us with ideas of their own. We often find that they have thought of things that hadn’t occurred to us. We expect them to report back to us frequently about their progress so we can make sure they are on track, but are often pleasantly surprised to find that they have made more progress than we expected them to make.
Assigning responsibilities requires some trust, and it is best to ease into this practice by first assigning projects that are a little bit forgiving of errors and missteps.
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