Making Trouble

INTERN, GET ME

A CAMPARI!

WHY SUMMER INTERNSHIPS ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN EVER BEFORE. By Saul Griffith

WITH THE LOSS OF INDUSTRIAL TRADES and craftsmanship, apprenticeships have declined steadily. They started in the Middle Ages, with young people spending about seven years living and working with master crafts-men in the hopes that one day they would become masters of their art.

The modern equivalent is the internship, devilishly satirized in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, when Zissou asks an administrator (who happens to be a topless blonde), “Do the interns get Glocks?” The answer: “No, they all share one.” It perfectly captures the two-edged sword that interns are faced with in this day and age.

This summer I had 13 interns. We rented a rambling, run-down house a short bicycle ride from the office, and the interns populated it. Two each were undergraduates from Berkeley, MIT, and Stanford, and one was from art school. Six more were high school students, most of them candidates from the Inven Teams program of the Lemelson Foundation.

Despite frustrations with California’s labor laws (it turned out that interns under 18 would not be allowed to use many of our power tools, access to which was probably the reason they had signed up for servitude), the summer was a huge success, both for my company and for the students who came to work with us.

Why was I offering the internships? It’s what I would have loved to do when I was in late high school. Interning in a high-tech company working on cutting-edge technology before going to college was not an option available to me, and probably not to most people. At the onset of the summer, I sat the students down to set expectations: “At worst you

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won’t get in the way ... At best you will make useful contributions!” It definitely turned out for the best.

I can think of only positive reasons why this should be the norm, and not the exception. I write here to encourage those readers of MAKE who have the power to offer internships to do so. More of them, lots of them. It’s easier than you think. It’s more rewarding than you can imagine.

SAUL’S STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE TO INTERNSHIPS: 1. Don’t expect core company work to get done by interns.

2. Expect a pleasant surprise.

3. Don’t underestimate the interns. They are likely smarter than you. Treat them like intelligent adults and give them responsibility over their own work.

4. If you have multiple interns, it’s great to have one a little older to help motivate and manage the rest. (Thanks, Jesse.)

5. Write a long list of things to do before they arrive. I found it useful to divide the list in termsof project duration: a. Projects of less than one day. This can be a long list. Think of all the things that don’t get done around your office: tool organization, light installation, furniture building, internet research projects, etc. b. One-day to one-week tasks. Things like helping engineers to assemble something (code or hardware), or self-contained peripheral projects.