Students need direction and want to feel useful. Please have a relevant, up-to-date job description for your students, take the time to set initial goals (hopefully related both to the work you need complete and to a couple of interests they personally have – I often suggest a 75% thought-out plan with 25% room for job crafting). Plan several check-ins for both regular task completion and for progress regarding the overall goals. Ensure you communicate deadlines for the student(s).

  ​Especially at the beginning of the experience, make yourself (or another relevant and knowledgeable colleague) available for questions. Organize weekly meetings (at minimum) to review the students’ work, provide direction and feedback, and answer any questions they may have. Do not be afraid to redirect students if they seem off track. Do not hold back from kindly correcting them if they’ve misunderstood or completed something wrong; this is a learning experience so they need to hear open and honest feedback.

  Yes, one of the main goals is that interns contribute to your organization and needs, but another main goal is that interns discover their own interests and skills so they can hone in on their career direction. Therefore, they need opportunities to explore and try new things. To help with this, as much as you’re able:

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• Take the students with you to meetings, conferences, networking events, etc. so they can observe and rub elbows with people from various aspects of the work. Giving them exposure to different roles and experiences related to your industry may spark excitement and interest the students weren’t aware they had; it may also spark an idea that they want to contribute to your organization.

• When crafting their roles, have some major tasks associated with your needs, but leave room for a creative assignment. Give your students a couple of weeks to observe, do a SWOT analysis, and pitch a project idea that they’d be interested in helping fill.

  I’d encourage you as a supervisor to be both flexible and stern in your work with interns. On one hand, many students need boundaries and need to learn that expectations come with the job and that deadlines cannot be adjusted – a percentage off for being late doesn’t work in the workplace like it does in the classroom. However, students are still learning, often have many obligations they’re juggling and do have emergencies occur, so flexibility is necessary and a good example to set for students within the right measure.

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  Hopefully, this is a no-brainer for you, but the world of unpaid internships is coming to an end, rightfully so. There’s plenty of literature on this so I will not reinvent the wheel here, but instead will encourage you to provide a fair rate for your interns as they do bring extreme value to organizations and deserve to be paid. I do understand that this has more boundaries in some fields than others. If you’re a nonprofit organization and struggle with being able to afford to pay an intern, reach out to me at anne.hocking@acu.edu to learn more about our Federal Work Study partnership. Also, see this NACE article for more on the why behind internships needing to be paid and this link for the federal regulations on unpaid internships.

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  Have you been in your role for a while? Do you have a lot of varied industry experiences you could share? Do you have a unique niche or passion that may be valuable for your students to learn more about? Be intentional to create learning opportunities for your students based on expertise you have (or someone else in your office who may relish the opportunity to lead and teach). Select a book they can read and discuss regularly with you. Have them do an additional certification as part of their role.

   Additionally, include midway (or periodic) and end of internship evaluations as a part of your supervision. Hopefully, if the student is doing this for credit, their professor will provide them with forms for this, but if not, utilize your own and be edifying in your feedback. I provide some samples for these on this page. Additionally, ACU has partnered with the National Association for Colleges & Employers (NACE) to offer all students the opportunity to utilize their Career Readiness assessment. If you’d like to intentionally provide your student(s) quality feedback, reach out to me about completing this assessment for your intern(s). 

  Again, these are learning experiences, and supervisors’ honest feedback is key to improvement.

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For those of you who believe your work is a place where you can live out your faith and, if your student is open to being mentored in this, I encourage you to go to my Vocational Formation Tips for Supervisors page to learn more.

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Of course, if this means extending an offer to the student for further employment, go for it! But if not, there are still things you can do to help your interns end well. 

1. Be intentional with any post-experience evaluations you are asked to fill out. You don’t want to be overly critical or overly polite with these. Students need to know how they can improve, so help give them some practical tips on how they can strengthen their professional skills. 

2. Conduct an exit interview with your intern, both so you can provide them personal feedback (maybe even reviewing any performance evaluations you’ve completed) and so they can let you know about their experience (providing you the ability to learn and grow for future interns as well). 

3. Proactively provide them with a letter of recommendation (addressed to “Whom It May Concern”) that they can take with them from their experience with you. 

4. Let the student know anyway that you can be a resource to them in the future. Are you willing to be a future reference? Do you have any connections they can utilize post-graduation? Would you want to go ahead and connect them with anyone in your network now?

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