Are Your Interns Really <br>Working For You?

Are Your Interns Really
Working For You?

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Oh how I love summer! The heat, the beach, the rooftop parties—and of course, the interns.

After all, summer is—at least in most major cities—The Season of The Interns. In New York, they’re everywhere, wearing badges and toting their laptops around the city as they dip their toes into the professional waters.

The truth is, while some of these eager little beavers will enjoy their internship experiences, a lot of them will walk away feeling dejected, disappointed, and disenchanted by the working world. They will spend the majority of their summers making copies, fetching coffee, and texting (or Gchatting, if their employer’s firewall hasn’t blocked Gmail) with their friends about how bored they are at work. The experience that was supposed to help them “figure out what they wanted to do” will leave them feeling useless and underwhelmed by their prospects for the future.

Frankly, this is unacceptable.

As someone who has had both rewarding and useless internships, and as someone who, as a full-time employee, has seen interns have both experiences, I can find no valid reason for a company to have a lame internship program.

A lot of companies make the excuse that interns can’t really be responsible for meaningful work because they’re not permanent employees, and no one wants to invest time training someone who’s going to be gone in 10 weeks. I’ve also heard the complaint that it takes more time to teach an intern to do something than it does to just do it yourself.

But I don’t see either of these as legitimate excuses. First, if you’re going to hire interns, and you’re going to pay them real money (which you are, since it’s illegal to have unpaid interns that are actually contributing to company productivity), don’t let them go to waste. For the sake of your brand, don’t let them fester in their own boredom. Give them something to do so that they walk away with a great summer experience and a positive view of your company!

Second, and more tangibly, make time to figure out what your intern can do and then help them do it. Think about all the side projects you wish you had time for but can’t squeeze in or all the tasks that you need to do but don’t want to—I bet there’s at least a few, if not a whole pile of them. What have you got to lose?

At my current company Ivy Exec, I volunteered, with the support of the rest of the Ivy team, to craft our summer intern’s curriculum. As you may have gathered, I think internship experiences should be positive, and I wanted to make sure our intern has an interesting and professionally valuable summer.

Granted, it’s only been three weeks since our intern started, but so far, she seems to be doing very well, and I know she’s not bored. While I don’t think I’ve done anything revolutionary, I do believe in the value of knowledge sharing. In the hope of sparing at least one more intern from a useless internship and/or inspiring someone else to give his or her intern more work, here is an outline of how I developed our intern’s program.

  1. I set up meetings with the heads of Ivy Exec’s different teams to get their thoughts on potential assignments they could give our intern.

  2. Based on the outcomes of these meetings, I selected three teams that I thought would be able to give our intern the best types of learning opportunities.

  3. I drafted up an overview of each team’s responsibilities, along with the projects the teams had proposed. I sent these to each team for review and made edits as necessary.

  4. I asked each team to commit to the following: a) schedule an initial meeting with our intern to go over what she could expect from the team for the summer, and b) set up deadlines and regular check-ins with our intern to make sure she was understanding her work and actually helping the team.

  5. I worked with my boss to develop an independent, summer-long project for our intern. This piece is especially critical because independent projects can give interns something to do even if their “daily” responsibilities are a bit slow.

  6. I put all of this information into an Ivy Exec Summer Internship Guide, which also included information such as expected daily hours, who to call on a sick day, nearby lunch spots, and an Ivy Exec Who’s Who, complete with pictures and job titles.

I check in with our intern daily, and we have a formal check-in once a week. If something isn’t working, she can let me know.

All of these pieces combined help our intern not only have work to do but also feel connected to the rest of the team. Again, by no means am saying that I’ve done something groundbreaking here. This is all fairly straightforward, and a lot of companies do have excellent internship programs.

But that’s exactly the point! Internships should be great experiences, and they should help college students get a feel for the working world. They should also benefit the company that hired them. I have been amazed by what our intern has contributed so far, and I’m looking forward to seeing what she does throughout the rest of the summer.

Ivy Exec
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Ivy Exec

Ivy Exec is the premier resource for professionals seeking career advancement. Whether you are on the job, or looking for your next one - Ivy Exec has the tools you need.

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