The way that a mentor introduces the project to an intern can have a big impact on the intern’s ownership of the project, their understanding of the project, and whether they feel like they are making a valuable contribution to your organization. Allowing the intern to come up with their own process may feel like a slow start to the project, but it has the potential to be very rewarding to the intern and the mentor because the intern will have more ownership and understanding of the project, and may take more initiative and use more creativity once they are up and running. Ultimately, investing this time up front could require much less time from the mentor.
In addition, there may be ways that you can make small adjustments to the project that will open up opportunities for the intern to meaningfully interact with your colleagues and learn the norms and ways of working (including unspoken ones) that exist within your team or the organization.
Some aspects of introducing the project to your intern are not specific to the project (e.g. introducing intern to your team and what role each person plays), which are important to do. The examples and how-to are focused on how you might design into your specific project ways that will set the intern up for a successful project experience. Here is how one mentor did it.
How to design a productive way to introduce intern to the project
★ Putting intern in the driver’s seat
How can you enable the intern to figure out how to tackle the project, so that they have ownership over how it is done, while still making sure they understand what they need to produce to be successful? Is there a particular aspect of the project that you can let them figure out how to do, if it isn’t practical to let them figure the whole thing out?
★ Enabling intern to see the big picture
Is there something that the intern can do early on in the project to get a really good sense of how their project fits into the bigger picture and how it will be used (other than you just telling them)?
★ Motivating intern about the project
If you’re thinking that the intern should get started by doing some background reading or training modules, is there a way that the intern can do something first that will motivate the reading/training? Is there something they could produce that drives and focuses their reading/training?
★ Learning workplace norms
Is there a way to design into the project good opportunities for the intern to learn about the norms of the team and/or organization (meetings, communication styles, etc.)?
★ Setting the stage for collaboration
Is there any way that you can design in ways that the intern will need to interact or collaborate with your colleagues as they do the project?