Lessons Learned After Hosting My First Summer Intern
By John Oliver, Manager of Property & Casualty Claims
It feels presumptuous to share insights with an audience of seasoned HR professionals after managing my first summer intern. But I suppose even a single experience can offer valuable lessons—especially when missteps are involved.
Motivation
Before the summer even began, I knew that the methods I use to motivate my other team members weren’t likely to work for our intern. Talk of promotions or bonuses aren’t really in the cards when we only have 90 days together, and in our case, there wasn’t a clear shortish-term path to full-time employment either.
To address all this, I asked my intern at the beginning of the summer to draft a version of the letter of recommendation he hoped I would write for him at the end of his time with our team. What did he wish I could say were his greatest strengths? How did he rise to the occasion? How did he interact with others?
This ended up being a great exercise for us both.
This exercise gave him an early opportunity to reflect on what he wanted to learn and experience. He considered his inherent strengths and thought about what he hoped to say about himself by the end of the summer—things he might not be able to say right now.
For me, I got to learn about his priorities and aspirations right away. I also had a chance to discuss whether I thought his goals for the summer were realistic or aggressive enough. Most importantly to me, I had an opening to check in with him if I ever felt like he wasn’t on track for the goals he set for himself.
This fairly simple exercise gave us a common language and helped me as his manager finds ways to motivate him if that motivation wasn’t coming naturally from within.
Capacity
While motivation was key, I quickly learned that my own capacity would be just as critical to the success of this experience.
Everyone knows on-boarding a new hire is hard work. Hosting an intern is essentially full-time on-boarding…and then the summer ends. You should not take a summer intern on if you are already feeling like your capacity is maxed out; it isn’t fair to you, your team, and, most importantly, your intern.
I knew all this going into the summer, and I did have capacity (and additional support from my colleagues) to handle the responsibilities…and then that all came crashing down one month into the summer.
A major, unplanned change in my team dramatically impacted my capacity, and suddenly, the vision I had for the summer shifted. I was unprepared. Had my intern not been so independent, resilient, and self-motivated, this could have been an absolute waste of his summer.
In hindsight, ‘no harm no foul’ might be the most generous assessment of my leadership this summer. Managing an intern is an incredible responsibility. They deserve a manager who’s ready for anything. I wasn’t.
Learn from my mistake; have a contingency plan if your capacity takes an unexpected hit.
Signaling
This may be the most unexpected lesson from our summer together.
When managed properly, an intern should be visible across your organization. They should interact with everyone—from senior leaders to new hires and everyone in between.
What was lost on me until recently is how much the personality and skillset of a group of interns – as well as the tasks and projects they tackle – can (and probably should) be viewed by the whole organization as a signal of priorities and preferences for the future of the firm.
It may seem obvious, but the message you send your workforce when you hire a group of college interns interested in artificial intelligence and machine learning is distinctly different from the message you send when you hire a group of interns selected for more traditional, relationship-based reasons, such as those connected to colleagues or business partners.
Neither is a necessarily a good or a bad message…but the signal is there for everyone to interpret…so you might as well be thoughtful about it at the jump.
So…
In conclusion, interns are a ton of work. But you already knew that.
In my experience, however, it was unquestionably worth it.
But that’s just my perspective from a first-timer’s point of view.
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