Former summer interns, question for you

[mrhills0146]

Question for anyone who has been through a summer intern program, has managed interns, or has administered a summer internship program.

What industry are you in? Technology? Manufacturing? Banking?
What functional area? Finance? IT? Operations? HR? Sales?
What types of existing skills did you expect from undergraduate-level interns?

I am trying to gauge, more directional than anything, reasonable goals for undergrad summer interns over a seven-week window. I don't want to narrow this and get too specific, as I'd like as many perspectives as possible.

High-level thoughts are what I'm after, since when I was an intern, it was so long ago that I answered the phone, made copies, sent faxes, and shredded paper. Would a summer intern be able to (for example) build a very basic financial model in Excel, or would it be more "Okay, this is what we call Excel..."

Please, before anyone says "it varies, depending on the individual..." I know that. I want to see if I can get any first-hand info on experiences from people on this board.

Any input and varying opinions would be much appreciated.

 

[Blackhood]

What kind of internship are you offering? High school kids will need a lot more guidance than University kids doing their Masters.

On the whole it is safe to assume that the candidates will have enough experience with computers to do what is needed, but they may need guidance on specific practices. For example I could program excel to calculate the trajectories of a ball thrown under varying gravities, but I'd need someone to explain how a financial model works.

 

[mrhills0146]

Proposal is for interns having completed their second or third year of undergrad. No University of Phoenix, no high school, no MBAs.

It is a proposal I am reviewing to structure a program for next summer, so I have time, and I'm thinking quite conceptually at this point.

 

[phreak]

Risk Management/Banking

Our summer interns are first or second year college students. They do mostly clarical work (make copies, scan **** for us etc) but also some basic MSOffice.

 

[Douglas]

Sorry to say this, but it really does run the gamut, and it depends on the company and also on the intern.

I interned at a political think tank. I did write a serious paper and the think tank published it. Other interns there did less serious work, and were not published. Others did mostly clerical work. Some did even more than me and ended up being hired on later.

I interned at a mutual fund. This fund had an unusually high-profile internship program; interns essentially did all the research heavy lifting, including building financial models, under the watchful eye of a research director. Every intern had to present two stocks over 10 weeks, and the fund would often take the intern's advice. Of course, the universe of companies to look at was guided by management, and to an extent so was the buy or sell call, but this was very serious stuff and your work was instrumental in the investment (or non-investment) of tens of millions of dollars.

These were both college (undergrad) internships. But full disclosure: the fund has become relatively successful and the internship program has developed a lot of prestige to the point where it is now almost exclusively occupied by top-tier MBA students.

My company now occasionally hires college interns. One summer an intern copied all of our paper prints and scanned them into electronic format. But another helped design an enclosure for one of our products.

IMO internship programs should be more than an excuse to say "we have an internship program." If they're just doing clerical work, it's really not worth much to either party. If they can offload some clerical work but also do something real that is focused, appropriate to their skill set, and easily checked/managed, that is the best scenario. They should really be adding value to you, and you should be really adding value to them.

 

[tj100]

Every summer I get stuck with two or three interns. Over the years, I've learned that they're really only capable of executing clerical work. I typically try to find a big 'research' kind of project for each of them that will take all summer, but won't be particularly difficult, and then fill the rest of their time with clerical crap. At the end of the summer, only about 25% of their work product has any actual value, but the clerical help is generally useful. The big thing to realize is that these kids often have no office work experience, and a big part of the internship is just figuring out normal office life.

 

[Johdus Fanfoozal]

I come from a completely different field, but here's my experience.

About 15 years ago between my junior and senior years at college I landed a coveted 10-week paid internship at one of the 10 biggest metropolitan newspapers in the U.S. It was a fairly big internship program - there may have been two to three dozen of us. We were dispatched to different areas at the paper - news, sports, features, copy editing, etc. Most were in news but were stuck in the main office. Their internship was pretty lame. They ended up writing obituaries and assisting staffers with stories.

A small group of us went to a critically-understaffed bureau where we were thrown to the wolves. I ended up writing about 70 stories that summer - five of them on the front page - and contributed to a Pulitzer Prize winner along with several other interns. It was such a fast-paced environment that there really wasn't much time for mentoring. You either could do the job or not.

I had a few things going for me: 1. I had worked on my college paper. It was a daily so tight deadlines were nothing new. 2. It was my hometown newspaper so I had a knowledge of the area that others (the program drew interns from across the country) just didn't have.

It was the best summer of my life and launched my career. So I'm a pretty big believer of the throw them to the wolves internship. After a few weeks, you'll know who can do that job and who can't. Assign tasks accordingly.

I have since taught journalism in college and have mentored interns in several newsrooms, but have never been the one selecting them. My minimum requirement is that they ought to be enthusiastic. You're in a new setting, earning some dough, doing what one would think you have an interest in. So if you're green or simply not that talented, at least be a hard worker. It goes a long way.

 

[mrhills0146]

Folks, keep them coming. This is most helpful!

 

[Nick0rz]

As a current intern working for a major transportation company, I can say that Im rather underutilized. The majority of stuff I've done is basic clerical stuff, shredding, and working on turning their library files into PDFs (sitting at a scanner all day)

Like what was mentioned before, throw em to the wolves to start, after a couple weeks the ones who can't handle it can be assigned to more clerical things, and the ones who can actually handle it can continue contributing to your organization.

 

[Valor]

Depends how coveted your internship is and therefore what caliber interns you can get.

Top tier financial institutions can get interns that basically do the same work as their first year analysts. If you're a tiny company with no rep then you'd probably only attract middling interns from state schools that require a ton of training.

If you comb through a thick stack of resumes and find some star interns you could load them up with some decently useful projects.

 

[thebac]

What sort of people can you realistically attract? Does it help the interns to have that internship on their resume? Are you paying them? How much are you paying them? Are you planning on offering them employment upon graduation? Which employers are you competing with?

If you can pick among people who are choosing from bulge-bracket and MBB internships, you can expect much more out of them than people who will take any internship, paid or unpaid.

Where I work, we're just a tad below the top-level internships, so we get interns that can get up to speed fairly quickly and pretty much do entry-level college graduate work. We also separately hire interns to do clerical work, but they tend to be a different caliber of student.

 

[meph]

If you could elaborate a bit on what your firm or department does, I think it'd be much easier to give you some advice. I've done a few different internships with finance firms and would be happy to give my two cents, but there's just way too much without knowing what sort of industry we're dealing with.

 

[imschatz]

Originally Posted by mrhills0146

Question for anyone who has been through a summer intern program, has managed interns, or has administered a summer internship program.

What industry are you in? Technology? Manufacturing? Banking?
What functional area? Finance? IT? Operations? HR? Sales?
What types of existing skills did you expect from undergraduate-level interns?

I am trying to gauge, more directional than anything, reasonable goals for undergrad summer interns over a seven-week window. I don't want to narrow this and get too specific, as I'd like as many perspectives as possible.

High-level thoughts are what I'm after, since when I was an intern, it was so long ago that I answered the phone, made copies, sent faxes, and shredded paper. Would a summer intern be able to (for example) build a very basic financial model in Excel, or would it be more "Okay, this is what we call Excel..."

Please, before anyone says "it varies, depending on the individual..." I know that. I want to see if I can get any first-hand info on experiences from people on this board.

Any input and varying opinions would be much appreciated.
I was a summer intern in "power marketing" - working for a company that traded electricity. I had finished my 3rd year of an economics undergrad.

My responsibilities were:
1) Developing forecasting models
2) Writing computer code to automatically produce a bunch of graphs/tables when databases were updated daily

At the end of the summer, I was tasked with presenting the results of my forecasting models to the company. Models sucked, but I learned a tonne.

 

[mrhills0146]

The proposal I am considering is to restructure a summer internship program in corporate finance for a Fortune 15 firm. Company is not a bank or financial services firm. The proposal is for a paid internship upon which we'd expect to hire some percentage of them back the following year (after graduation) into a rotational management development program. Expect that the internship would be valuable to have on one's resume even if that candidate did not end up being hired after graduation.

I withheld this information because it is useful for me to hear about summer intern experiences from those who are/were not focused in Finance.

I'm more interested in what could those who would manage these interns reasonably expect them to do? Obviously there will be wide variation here, but I am not inclined to pursue this if in general we can only expect clerical-type responsibilities. That would have minimal benefit for the interns and (arguably) zero benefit to the company.

 

[meph]

Corporate Finance at a Fortune 15 would be a HUGELY popular program. To be fair, you'll be getting a ton of people who weren't able to break into the top Wall Street firms, but you're going to be able to attract some highly talented and capable individuals. Check out the GE FMP program if you aren't familiar with it, it's definitely one of the more highly regarded corporate finance rotationals out there.

You're absolutely going to be able to recruit people for this program who are capable of far, far more then mindless clerical work. The general consensus for the kinds of programs is that you generally do what a first or second year analyst would do.

If you want my personal advice, do some sort of mentor program. Having someone looking out for you, who can share their experience with you, is something that really makes a program worthwhile. Without a direct mentor you run the risk of floating around between people without really feeling too comfortable with what you're doing.

Happy to discuss this further or answer an specific questions you may have -- finance internships have pretty much consumed the better portion of the past year of my life...