In her role as the Director of Social Impact & Sustainability at UF’s Warrington College of Business, Dr. Kristin Joys has connected us with MANY of Greater Sum’s most cherished interns. When we gathered to discuss internships earlier this summer, she shared some tips for successful, meaningful experiences with interns. Dr. Joys has given permission for us to share them more broadly here.

Prepare: the more engaged you are as a supervisor & mentor, the better work your interns will do for you. Devote time to preparing to onboard your interns and schedule regular checkins with them, especially if they are working virtually. Having face-time with you helps your Interns to be successful in accomplishing what you ask of them.
Pay: please plan to pay your interns, it’s an issue of equity (for more see NACE's Position Statement: All Internships Should be Paid).
Provide clear instructions: Interns often do best with both written & verbal instructions, tools like Loom are great for SOPs so you don’t feel like a broken record— you can record them once and update as needed.
Perspective & Purpose: help your interns to see the big picture about how and why their tasks matter. Help them understand how their efforts help further your mission (especially when their tasks may feel like busy work), doing so gives them a sense of purpose & meaning (which goes a long way in motivating them to work hard).
Personal & Professional: get to know your Interns as people, it’s important that they feel like you see them and care about them as humans. It’s equally important to treat them as professionals. This may be their first professional experience. You may be their first boss (as mentioned in this great quote from an article on Linkedin: "Don’t pick a job. Pick a Boss. Your first boss is the biggest factor in your career success." And Brené Brown said, "Who we are is how we lead. Self-awareness, kindness, vision, accountability, trust, just basic skills of being a good human being to other human beings.”
Praise & offer positive feedback often: see these stellar resources for how to do so:
Stop Serving the Feedback Sandwich - Adam Grant
Engaged Feedback - Brene Brown
Wes Kao’s newsletter
Patience: Interns don’t know what they don’t know and they can’t read your mind. Rather than giving Interns a deadline for a project, schedule checkins at multiple milestones, well in advance of the final deadline, so they can share their progress and receive feedback, resulting in a final draft is much more likely to be the most helpful product you’re hoping they will create.
Promote: Offer your Interns to stay on after their initial internship has ended if they’d be an asset to your organization. Whether or not you’re able to hire them, it’s helpful for their future career success if you share on Linkedin your appreciation for their efforts as an Intern.

For more information about Best Practices when working with Interns, see the resources Dr. Joys compiled here: https://bit.ly/dogoodwell-intern-tips. You can follow her work at Do Good Well Consulting on Substack.