Lessons from Summer Interns

I managed my first ever interns this summer. Having two, especially two with different backgrounds and different skillsets, helped me glean insights I might not have otherwise. I learned the following lessons.

• No matter how someone reaches your door or how their resume reaches your desk, interview them yourself. You’re contemplating investing time in that person and you owe it to yourself as well as them to determine (1) whether your personalities / work styles are compatible, (2) what level of commitment they have to the project, and (3) what their strengths and weaknesses are.

• Make sure you have a well-scoped project established before taking an intern. The tricky aspect is choosing a project that matters but that you aren’t impatient about. This is tricky because if a project is worth doing, typically you want to prioritize it.

• Make expectations clear at the start of the internship. At least for me, my expectations include:

  • In general, I am 100% happy to help interns when they need help. However, there’s a parabolic relationship between the elapsed time since finding a problem and how happy I’ll be to help. Specifically, if the intern asks for help immediately after finding a bug, I want the intern to struggle alone (at least for a little while) to build their problem solving skills. If the intern waits a week before asking for help, I will be upset that progress was stalled for so long. I think a good rule of thumb is 1-2 hours.

  • There’s a pervasive culture of regularly scheduled meetings for set durations. I hate this. I prefer my meetings to be as long as necessary, but with an agenda and focused questions/discussion. I am happy to meet as often as an intern requests, but when we meet, I’d like to ask that the intern come prepared with a list of things to discuss (problems, suggestions, questions, whatever).

  • I prefer short, frequent meetings over long, infrequent meetings. There’s no shame in cutting a meeting 15 minutes or 45 minutes short. I appreciate the respect that ending a meeting displays for my time, and I will offer the same to you.

• Establish a set time to take and give feedback. This will help ensure resentment doesn’t build up over time due to unspoken issues.

• A friend suggested that in the future, I (1) require daily stand-up and (2) tell my intern to work on a few threads in parallel so that if ever a single one is blocked, she can pivot to work on another until she becomes unblocked.

• As a last comment, I’ll probably impose basic linear algebra as a necessary prerequisite.