Teamwork, support and structure: the core principles of rewarding student internships

Universities are increasingly looking to student partnerships and co-creation to improve the student experience; from inclusion and decolonisation to assessment and transitions. Student internships can facilitate meaningful partnerships, enabling staff to collaborate with students while giving students paid employment alongside the chance to make genuine changes in their university.

Last summer, we piloted a new approach to the long-running Students as Change Agents programme. Rather than having students volunteer to work on their own change projects alongside their studies, we recruited six student interns to lead on distinct pieces of work within three student experience projects. The interns worked full-time over six weeks, and it was rewarding to see their confidence and skills develop over this short period. Although a successful experience, it was also a steep learning curve.

Our experience highlighted that embracing teamwork, offering the right support and structure and focusing on tangible outputs are all vital to developing meaningful student internship and project experiences. I explore each of these themes in more detail below.

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Enable teamwork

If you’re recruiting multiple interns, or hiring for several projects, consider bringing your interns together as a team. This can have several benefits. As staff, you can draw on additional perspectives and access a broader range of skills and experience. For the interns, teams foster a sense of camaraderie and offer peer support. Learning to navigate the team dynamic is itself a valuable skill. To foster a successful team from the outset, encourage the students to establish team values, and check in with them periodically to gauge how well these are being embedded. One of our best decisions was to have our interns work as a team across all three of our projects, rather than assigning them to individual projects. I witnessed how they each grew into their roles, developing  confidence and refining their communication and teamworking skills.

Provide reliable support

Students leading projects or undertaking internships can be some of the most impressive and talented students you will encounter. However, even among the best and the brightest, their experience of the working world may be limited. Although they will undoubtedly have the ability to produce great work, if they’re going to thrive, regular contact and a reliable support network are essential. Whether it be their line manager, or other staff linked to their project(s), student interns need someone who can make them their number one priority – someone to act as a sounding board, answer questions, provide reassurance and offer guidance. For our projects, although we had three project leads, I line managed all six interns from my base in academic development and acted as their principal contact. I was able to bring them together as a team, support them in their day-to-day work and help to balance the competing needs of each project. A central line manager or support contact could feasibly be drawn from any number of professional or academic teams at your institution, as long as they are able to consistently show up for their interns and make them their priority for the duration of the projects.

Offer clarity and structure

A significant challenge when partnering with students is striking the balance between offering guidance and giving them autonomy to shape projects. In our experience, the more clarity and structure you can provide at the outset, the more likely they will be to hit the ground running and make the projects their own. Providing a clear and detailed initial brief, which outlines a range of initial tasks and recommended outputs, will go a long way towards reassuring and galvanising your interns.

Providing structure to the working week can be equally beneficial. This is not about micromanaging, but about giving interns a framework and level of routine in which they can work. A successful decision we made was to introduce the interns to some of the principles of agile working. With the support of our digital team, we combined elements of the popular Scrum and Kanban methods to adopt our own “scrumban” project management approach for the duration of the internships. This included brief daily “stand-up” meetings, as well as weekly “refinement” and “retrospective” meetings, where interns could collectively plan and review their week. This not only introduced the interns to a new way of working, it gave them a clear routine they could work within. Whatever the chosen framework, providing interns with a level of structure in their working week will be reassuring and will offer them a balance of support and accountability.   

Focus on tangible outputs

Every intern deserves the opportunity to finish their experience having made a meaningful contribution to their institution. Whether leading an entire project, or supporting a broader initiative, ensuring they have something tangible to show for their time is a must for supporting continued motivation and engagement. Although our three projects remain ongoing a year later, we ensured that when designing the internships our students could lead on producing distinct and varied outputs; including reports, portfolios and a range of creative pieces. These gave the interns something concrete to present following their internships to demonstrate their impact.

Although our project and internship needs will undoubtedly vary in the future, these principles will remain at the core of our planning and support. We hope they can help shape some successful opportunities for partnership and co-creation at your institutions. 

Craig McEwan is an academic developer at the University of Exeter.

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