

Hiring Summer Interns? How to Make the Most of Them - kdouth
http://www.thedailymuse.com/career/hiring-summer-interns-5-ways-to-make-the-most-of-them/

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jmduke
The best internship I ever had was before I switched my career path to
computer science; it was an accounts internship at a small (~10 FTEs, ~10
freelancers) advertising firm. It was unpaid besides a small meal &
transportation stipend.

The atmosphere was very similar to what you'd expect from a small tech firm:
friendly, low-key atmosphere, lots of nicknames, lot of small fun free things.
My mentor (I don't really know what his actual title was. I just called him
Joel.) explained to me that there were two parts of what I was doing:

1\. Fake work (his words, not mine.) He said that there would be downtime, and
that I should spend it as productively as possible; if that meant taking on
some grunt work for a neglecting client, good. If that meant browsing the
internet, fine. It was my time, and he said he trusted me enough to assume
that if I wanted to spend my summer on Reddit then I would have done so from
my couch.

2\. Real work. Joel explained that the difference between an intern and a
junior employee was usually a piece of paper and a few months of experience
and little else; as such, he explained that I'd be given a certain level of
autonomy. I had mistakenly assumed this to mean "you can go to meetings and
you can go down the street for coffee": what this meant was "you are expected
to meet and converse with clients on your own."

I fondly remember sitting across the table from a small bakery looking to open
its third store, poring over market research and possible online advertising.
That summer I was referred to as a 'social media guru', a term which I realize
is sort of toxic but I was so proud of this place that had made me feel
valuable. That summer I was given a taste of what the industry was like, not
by attending flashy events or getting a bunch of branded apparel but by doing
the work that someone would do. There's a lot of talk in the tech sphere about
auto-didacticism, but what I learned in that internship could never be found
in a book or on Coursera.

(Ironically: one of the pieces of 'fake work' that I gobbled up was
maintenance of a bunch of WordPress sites that needed maintenance. Instead of
using the firm's usual web design guy, who charged $200/hr for basic HTML &
CSS work that even I could do, I convinced one of the partners to just let me
do it instead. I had so much fun I decided to take a few CS classes for kicks,
and then somehow I ended up with a Computer Science major.)

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dnautics
This is almost completely how I run my internship: A bit of background, I'm at
an independent science research nonprofit, my research is in synthetic
biology.

I will say one point of disagreement is in the selection process, I look at
the college first. If a college student is at a big research university, and
in their 2nd or 3rd year, they shouldn't be interning with us, they should be
pursuing research opportunities locally. So I restrict my search to 1st years
from big universities or students from primarily undergraduate universities
generally. I will never take a graduate student intern. My second criteria is
the essay, and I always cross-check what they say about themselves against the
transcript. You can't proudly 'you really love math' and then pull a C- on
your first quarter of calculus in the second-tier calculus class. You may
actually love math, and just had a terrible quarter where your family members
passed away, but in that case you should't say it in your essay, right?

I plan well in advance what the student will be doing. Typically my strategy
is a new project all their own that will be highly repetitious (i.e. doing the
same tasks repeatedly) but which will culminate in a broad understanding after
cumulative effort. I think it's a horrible waste to have your intern just do
things that are your scraps or to try to have them 'experience everything'.
They'll SEE everything that's going on around them, better for them to achieve
mastery over one task with the short time. Amazingly, this year, my intern has
gotten the ropes and is basically ready to hit hyperdrive after three weeks. I
also let my interns have a lot of independence, if they want to pursue an
experiment off of the agenda, I encourage them to do it (though I try to steer
them away from foolish wastes of time).

I usually welcome my intern with a BBQ cookout at the beginning of the
internship. This is in addition to other social activities that the institute
provides. I also try to help them find things to do in town. One of my bosses
is a Nobel laureate and he has a BFF; they're great personalities, so as a
bonus, I arrange for my intern to have a private lunch with the two of them
towards the end of their internship.

Thirdly, I structure the internship as follows: I don't plan for inordinate
meetings, that just gets in the way. With three months, my structure is for
the first month to really ramp up on the technique, the second month to
explode in productivity with the learned technique (to saturate their time
doing it), and I leave the third month for the student to take it in whatever
direction they choose. Usually the project I put them on is HIGHLY risky, but
one where after two months you can do an assessment to determine if the path
is likely to bear any fruit - and I have a 'backup plan' for the third month,
where I assign a different project that uses the same techniques that is
almost guaranteed to result in something learned.

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keiferski
6\. Pay them. In case anyone forgot or doesn't know, unpaid internships are
illegal.

Edit: _sometimes_ illegal

~~~
ameister14
That's not entirely accurate. A guideline for unpaid internships is that the
interns should contribute nothing to your business; they get to learn and you
get to train them so you might get a better shot at employing them later, or
at least know if you don't want to hire them.

~~~
dylanvee
What's cool about our industry is that interns can contribute _a lot_ , on or
soon after day one.

~~~
ameister14
Sure, but then they need to be paid. That's why I said it was a guideline for
unpaid interns.

If you don't pay them something for the work they do, that's sometimes illegal
and definitely immoral.

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tom_b
Having both been a summer intern and supervised summer interns since, I have
followed the advice of the person who mentored me as a summer intern when it
was time to work with my own:

Choose a project you would do if you had time, but is off the critical path of
your project plans, then help bring your intern up to speed on the nature of
the problem you want to solve, make yourself available, and give them some
breathing room.

After that, I try to remove as much friction from the work process as possible
- make sure they aren't handed the laptop from the bottom of the storage
cabinet that is running an OS from 2002, have access to test servers (db, app
server, etc) as needed, and get them access to other people who can provide
other support as needed.

In general, I want interns to have projects that can "tell a good story" and
help them along their career path.

It helps that I had two great intern/co-op experiences and one that was
terrible. On the terrible one, I was literally handed a stack of dusty manuals
and then abandoned for the summer. No deliverable, no regular meetings with
anyone, nothing. I needed the pay to finish school and it took me a two or
three week window to realize that I was on my own.

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tylermac1
My internship now follows all of these points very well. In particular,

1\. I'm compensated very well (plus they pay my rent in a metropolitan area).

2\. I've already contributed greatly to their internal products.

3\. They ask me what I like to work on. (I was hired with a more systems-
engineering speciality but have the opportunities to do web dev work if I
choose).

4\. They have me working with a brilliant developer who is probably the
smartest and kindest man I've ever met.

5\. I feel like a part of the company after only a month.

My internship last summer seemed like a complete joke after I've been at my
current one.

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misframer
During my last internship, I spent the majority of my time working on a
project idea I came up with. Apparently it ended up being much more difficult
than what the team there was going to come up with, but it was a lot of fun. I
learned a lot.

Eventually, the summer project became an important feature of their product.
It feels great to have a significant contribution as an intern.

If you're hiring interns, ask them what they would like to do. It might let
them make the most out of your internship.

