How to Be a Good Mentor for Your Summer Intern
A few years ago, I had the chance to mentor a few interns who joined our team for the summer. I was on a mission to make sure they had a positive experience that made them excited about the company and helped them understand what it was like to work in the tech industry. I collected stories and tips from interviewing directors, managers, technical leaders, and interns at different companies that helped me put together a framework and strategies that you can apply to be a more effective mentor for your interns or new hires who join your team.
Let’s get started!
Decide if you have the resources to support an intern
Whether it’s through regular 1:1s or providing feedback on their deliverables, you can expect to dedicate 25% of your time helping and supporting your intern. Assess your schedule, upcoming deliverables, and ongoing projects to evaluate if you have the bandwidth to support an intern.
Ask yourself: Can I spend 25% of my time mentoring an intern?
I recommend chatting with your manager and teammates to evaluate your team’s priorities and availability. You may discover that a coworker is going on paternity leave, and you may need to step up and take more work during that time. Or your manager might tell you that your team will be taking on a high-impact project that will need all the resources it can get. Even if you are certain that you have the capacity, it is a good idea to share your thoughts with your team to make sure that they are on the same page with you. After all, you want your intern to touch base with everyone else on the team and know who they can go to for questions.
Reflect on the strengths and skills you can use to support your intern
Let’s say that you’ve decided to be a mentor for an intern, or maybe your team assigned you to this role. Either way, it is a good idea to reflect on why you would like to be a mentor.
Ask yourself: What kind of experience would I like to provide to an intern? What skills or key learnings can I offer?
As a manager or mentor to your intern, think about how you can:
- Early on, share relevant resources like style guides, articles, and slide decks from leadership about relevant initiatives and projects. These resources can help your intern get some context about their role and the skills they need to succeed.
- Have empathy for your intern and their experience. It’s vital to be invested in their growth, and recognize that it’s OK for them to make mistakes! The most important thing is teaching the intern to learn from their “failures” and move forward.
- Provide constructive feedback on key deliverables, slide decks, and emails to leadership. Don’t just tell them what to do differently — ask the guiding questions that help them understand the “why” behind your feedback or connect their work to the team’s and company’s values.
- Advocate for your intern so they have visibility with leadership, find relevant opportunities for them to share their work broadly, and use your spheres of influence to connect your intern with the right people. Ensure that your intern and their work have visibility with the rest of your organization.
- Connect your intern to people at the company with similar interests, career goals, and expertise. Networking is key to an internship!
Congratulations! Let’s say you’ve decided to support an intern. What comes next?
Reach out to your intern before their internship begins
Prior to your intern arriving, send them an email or set up a call with them to answer any questions they may have before they get started. This is a great opportunity to share some context about the work of your team and its key responsibilities at the company. This enables your intern about their role and the kind of work they’ll be working on.
You can ask your future intern about:
- Their current course load and what I was learning in their program
- The skills they want to develop further in this internship
- Their future career goals, and how that could fit into this internship or elsewhere at the company.
Based on this conversation, gauge your intern’s strengths, weaknesses, interests, areas they would like to grow. This information will help you scope their intern project and identify a few people that they may want to connect with.
Assemble everything you need and outline potential projects
Your intern will probably need the same equipment as other people on the team. This might be taken care of if you work at a company with an established internship protocol; however, if your company is new to having interns, you might have to put in a request for a laptop, monitor, desk, and other equipment that your intern might need. In case of a remote internship, you may need to allocate extra time to ship equipment to them prior to their start date.
Scope the internship project
The internship project is the most important thing for you to get right. Ideally, a successful intern project should:
- Leverages their existing skills and challenges them to do something new: Ideally, a project should be an extension of the intern’s skill set and coursework, but challenge them to apply it in a new context or target audience or user base. This will also ensure what their project is a good fit for your intern’s resume and portfolio.
- Can be finished, tested, and measured for effectiveness: It might be valuable to connect your intern with end users of your product or service, or encourage them to run usability tests of their deliverables and iterate accordingly.
- Have impact beyond the internship: Even if the project doesn’t end up in a project, it should have a clear goal and inform decision-making in the future.
- Include measurable outcomes: Set expectations by defining what would make the project impactful and how that impact is measured from a business perspective. Does this project have a dependency on another team that may cause it to finish after the duration of the internship? You may want to mitigate those risks or find a project that is more likely to work out.
Supporting your intern on the job
Your intern might have lots of questions for you, so make sure you provide them the opportunity to sync with you by setting up recurring 1:1 where they can connect about their project deliverables or share any concerns they may have.
Last week and beyond
To support and celebrate their efforts, arrange an opportunity for them to showcase their work for the team and leadership by giving an intern presentation or lightning talk about what they worked on. This can help them reflect on what they have accomplished, and it ensures that others in the company are more aware of their work and impact.
Conclusion
When a bee finds a flower with lots of nectar, they fly back to their colony and tell the rest of their bee family about the food and where they should go to get tasty nectar. Very much like a bee, your summer intern will go off to school and share their experience with their network. This can be their friends, societies and groups that they are involved in, and even other recruiters. If they have a positive experience, not only they will want to come back, but they will also bring a lot of great talent who is already excited to work at your company. Being a mentor is about teaching and inspiring the next generations. By being a supportive intern mentor or manager, you’re empowering them to support other students and colleagues in the same way. And there’s nothing more powerful than lifting others as you climb.
