Super internships: here is how

Every year Slash takes around 10-15 interns across our Singapore, Phnom Penh and our (NEW!) Bali office.

Interns are often seen as cheap labor. We don’t see it this way at Slash. The hidden cost of assigning senior team members to train and coach interns quickly adds up.

We see it as an opportunity to bring fresh perspective to the team. We recruit interns for real projects and empower them to bring their best selves to projects.

This does come with some challenges. Often they have no prior experience sitting in an office environment, doing extended team work, or concentrating on a single project for more than 10 days in a row..

For the last 2 batches we have been experimenting with the internship format to create a ‘super internship’. Well, at least, that’s our modest goal!

Here are our learnings. And because I know you don’t have the patience to read an entire article, I have structured it buzzfeed-style:

5 ways to create a super internship.

#1 Align project to Intern motivation

This is People Management 101. If you want to attract the right interns and give them an amazing experience, you have to find out what drives them and align your company objectives with theirs.

This was one of our key filters during the interview stage. Throughout the internship you also have to check against this. We did this through regular informal chats and during more formal project allocations.

This is one of the reasons why we prefer to take interns that can work 4–6 months with us. If the period is too short, say 6–8 weeks, it is hard to really align the intern and company objectives and have both parties benefit from it.

#2 Learning Bootcamps using ‘Playlists’

Once you have alignment between their motivation and your company goals, you can get cracking.

We often work on hi-tech projects in AI and Blockchain, as well as modern web & mobile tech. Our operating assumption is that our interns have limited theoretical knowledge of those topics from university, so we have to give them a tech bootcamp.

There is plenty of quality online courses out there (Coursera, Udemy, MITx to name just a few), taught by world-class instructors. Why reinvent the wheel? We are experimenting with curating ‘Playlists’ of video courses based on the course’s technical accessibility and learning value.

It’s surprising what a group of motivated students can learn if you give them good playlists and a goal!

#3 Time-boxed, project-based learning

That brings us to the Project. We structure the internships around concrete, measurable and time-bound projects. By time-boxing the delivery period, you provide the interns with permission to focus.

For example, the first week of the previous intern batch, we gave them a 4 weeks to build an English chatbot from scratch. They had no prior knowledge of Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing, and limited API and Web experience.

To our surprise, they (mostly) succeeded! They successfully demo’d the chatbot to our entire team, to great acclaim. Besides the concentrated learning process they went through, it also helped experience success early-on in the internship which boosts motivation. We used that bootcamp to better understand the strengths and weakness of each intern, for their next project.

#4 Allocate sufficient mentoring and coaching time

We didn’t quite get this right. We used a 1:5 mentor-to-intern ratio in the past. I think that ratio could work well, if the mentor is full-time — something we couldn’t commit to previously.

Besides allocating mentor time, the mentoring or coaching process is important. There are plenty of philosophies on this, especially in software development (e.g agile coach, pair programming etc).

We aim to work in Agile and to encourage pair programming between senior and junior team members where possible. Now, in practice this doesn’t always work out due to resource constraints, deadlines, etc. That’s for another post!

#5 Create a public stage for interns to share work

During a boozy evening, one of the interns suggested it would be cool to present their projects to a larger audience.

And so … we organized a workshop for 120 people on Artificial Intelligence with half the agenda ran by the interns. It was a big hit!

Such a big hit in fact that we turned it into a learning community in Phnom Penh called Startup Jungle, that hosts monthly free workshops to learn ‘survival skills for the startup jungle’ — everything from product and technology skills, to lean methodologies to grow a business.

We had lots of fun and in the process built something we could be proud of.

A typical internship day at Slash?

What do our previous interns have to say about a typical internship day at Slash?

“There is no typical day at Slash! There is always room for creativity and fun breaks. We could manage our time as we wanted. I worked on a NLP-chatbot and image processing and classification application.” — Tristan Luiggi

“A typical week at Slash would be quite diverse, we could a lot of different work. We would usually have 1 meeting where we could discuss a new approach or technology. By doing so, we would stay in track and never lose ourselves. Because there is a lot to learn about Machine Learning and Neural Networks, I would read a lot. Everyone at Slash is really kind and helpful, so the work environment is good. The workflow is good too. What I missed is more mentoring at the beginning to guide us through difficulties.” — Paul Fevre

“Working at Slash was a really nice experience. We weren’t monitored which was nice. We could take breaks when we needed them, no need to ask permission or what ever. It was really nice to be independent. We could also work on what motivated us, which was really nice because it really motivated us!” — Sirine Kefi

“My day at Slash. Morning: Lot of reading about different subject then I try to read about my current problem in the current project (e.g for NewsScrawler reading about unsupervised learning).

Afternoon: Try to convert these readings into ideas for the current project and test them. What I liked the most was the freedom I had in my job. What could be better is to learn a little bit more from my colleagues” — Clement Magnard

To our fellow entrepreneurs, how are you running your internship programs?

Interested in an internship at Slash?

We are looking for software engineers who are motivated, flexible and open-minded, a positive attitude, and have a keen interest in hi-tech (AI and Blockchain in particular). Our standard internships run from August-January, in Phnom Penh, but for the right candidate we can be more flexible.

Contact us at [email protected].

ABOUT

Andries De Vos is a serial entrepreneur and CEO of Slash.co, a hi-tech venture builder run by a team of hackers, engineers and entrepreneurs. We split our time between helping MNCs and funded startups built their awesome products, and incubating our own tech projects centered around AI and Blockchain.