How to Mentor Interns to Become Skillful Engineers

Why internships are important for companies and interns

Internships are a great opportunity for companies to invest in great talent and train future engineers. It is important to prepare a good mentorship plan for the interns, so that they make the best use of their time and acquire experiences that will help make them full-time employees in the future.

Mentor

The first step is to assign a mentor (or mentors) to onboard and support the intern.

Questions to ask

1. What is the project that the intern will be working on?
2. Is the project estimated to complete before the end of their internship?
3. Does the project cover different learning opportunities for the intern?
4. By the end of the project, what kind of experience is expected for the intern to have acquired?
5. What kind of learning and onboarding resources does the intern need to be able to start working on the assigned project?
6. How will you measure and evaluate the success of the intern?
7. If multiple mentors are going to support an intern, how will they sync with each other?

Milestones and tasks

Chunk the timeline into milestones; for example, over a 12-week internship, you might have these milestones:

• Milestone 1 (2 weeks): An onboarding and learning phase that could include some minor tasks to help the intern get comfortable with the flow of work.
• Milestone 2 (1 week): Project handover and tasks discussion.
• Milestone 3 (6 weeks): Project work completion.
• Milestone 4 (2 weeks): Project review, bug fixes, and enhancements.
• Milestone 5 (1 week): Demos, internship wrap-up, and evaluation.

Phases of support.

• Phase 1: Close monitoring and daily sync
• Phase 2: Loose monitoring, and syncing every few days.
• Phase 3: Loose monitoring, and syncing as-needed.