The internship is over and I thought I'd write a few words on my experience. Notice I am writing this as a manager. You'll have to ask the intern for feedback on her side.
The interview process is a very important step where you have the opportunity to find a candidate that hopefully will be a good match. You are going to spend a lot of time with her and it is worth spending time in this step. Review the resumes thoroughly and try to find clues. The students will not have too much work experience to write about but you can always extract information on the college projects they list. During the interview, ask them to tell you about their projects. You want to hear authentic enthusiasm and most importantly, they have to be able to articulate what was the project about and what contributions they made. In my experience, you can reduce the list of candidates by a significant amount just by focusing on this.
A special mention about candidates for which English is not their first language. That should not stop you from being able to articulate clearly the projects you worked on. It probably means that you (the intern) has put more work in preparing the interview.
As a manager, it is very important to have a list of projects ready. You want to have ready two or three projects for the intern to work. During the interview, ask them which one they'd like to work on and why and try to gauge their level of interest. Those projects should be things that you are exited to work on and/or will have a real impact. You will be working quite a bit with the intern, if you think you are going to just drop the project on her and synchronize occasionally maybe you should reconsider doing this. You have an opportunity (and responsibility) to have a positive impact on the personality of this young candidate. This is worth the time and effort.
Before the intern starts, you have the basic infrastructure and scaffold of the project ready. This serves two purposes. First, it clarifies your thoughts on what has to be done in the project and may help you redefine the scope, or maybe dropping the project altogether before the intern starts. Second, it helps the intern to make contributions quickly as you will provide a clear picture on what the project is about.
In the first two weeks of the internship I spend a lot of time going over the project with the intern to make sure she built a good mental model of it. Make sure you give enough space for her to think and come up with good questions to help solidify her understanding of the project.
We used Github issues to keep track of the tasks and most importantly to discuss details about them. That worked out very well for us. When necessary, typically two or three times a week, we would jump on zoom to go over the different tasks and discuss next steps. This is also a great way to capture details that can be used later when the intern is preparing the slides for the group presentation (more on that below).
I did give the intern all the time they needed to make progress. I do not like micro-managing. I don't think it works. Again, everything worked great for us and we were making progress, week by week. I could see how engaged the intern was through out the internship.
This is the culmination of all the work done. Here, the intern presents to the group all the work she did. My intern enjoyed working on the slides and came out with a great presentation. You want to start working on this two or three weeks before the presentation day, because, as you know, presenting is hard.
Here is what worked for me: start with the main points you want to communicate and keep developing, shaping them. Let the intern refine the slides and present them regularly as she mades progress. Have the intern give you the presentation regularly and provide feedback so she can refine it. The purpose here is to have a solid presentation that the intern is comfortable delivering. Practice, practice, practice.
This has been a fantastic experience and I am grateful for the opportunity to be part of it. Seeing the impact you have in your intern's personality and development is extremely rewarding and humbling.
drio out!