InformationWeek

June 4, 2001

Online Exclusive:
Getting Value From Your IT Interns
What does it take to make your company's student internships a success? Some companies find out the hard way

By Sandra Swanson (sswanson@cmp.com)

hen Jules Kaplan, president of ChekFaxx Development Co. Inc., hired an intern to do some Visual Basic work last year, he had few reservations. The student had received A's in his college Visual Basic classes and was highly recommended by his instructor. Besides, it was only for 13 weeks, Kaplan says: "I figured, what could it hurt?"

Quite a bit, as it turns out. Kaplan paid the intern $3,900 but didn't get much in return--except a 13-week project delay. "When it was all finished, we had to take what he did and trash it," Kaplan says.

That's certainly not the case with all IT internships. Students can provide valuable assistance, but to make the most of internships, companies must weigh their choices carefully. That includes setting clear goals for students, and it sometimes means valuing business skills over IT skills.

"In the future, I would concentrate on the students' general knowledge of how business works," instead of looking for the top students in computer science classes, says Kaplan, whose Scottsdale, Ariz., software company lets computer printers produce customer-authorized checks. His intern's understanding of business process soon became apparent. During the interview, he'd told Kaplan that he understood accounts receivable programs and had taken bookkeeping classes. That didn't tell the whole story, though. "After a few weeks, I realized he didn't know the difference between a debit and a credit." Kaplan is willing to hire an intern again, but next time he'll ask the candidate to work for a one-week trial period without pay.

Benny Fischer, chief technology officer at an Internet service provider in Tempe, Ariz., also places a premium on skills other than IT. Fischer wanted to hire summer interns for the company's customer-support staff, so he interviewed top computer-science students from a nearby high school district. None of the candidates made it past the interview. The students had plenty of Internet skills, but lacked interpersonal ones. "Next time, we'll look for people with strong customer-support skill sets and some technology interest, instead of the other way around," he says.

One company that takes IT internships very seriously is eOriginal Inc., which provides technology to create and store electronic documents. As a small but growing company, eOriginal views internships as an opportunity to assess the skills of students who could be future employees. Instead of calling them interns, the Baltimore company uses the term "associate software engineer." "We really treat them like employees," says Kathyrn Whitmore, VP of software engineering. When students arrive on Day One, they have a prepared job description, a set of specific objectives, and an assigned team. Accountability is key. "Their names will appear on work plans for executing those projects," Whitmore says. Interns are reviewed throughout the assignment, as well as at the end.

Northrop Grumman Corp. also recognizes the need to plan internships carefully. "In previous years, we've spotted success and failure with internships, depending on how well-defined the individual assignments are," says Greg Hodges, director of employment and recruiting for the company's electronic sensors and systems sector in Baltimore. Like eOriginal, Northrop considers interns as candidates for employment--but first, students need to consider Northrop as a potential employer. Internships give Northrop an opportunity to have its name better known as "a really cool place to work, or in the worst-case scenario, a boring place to work," Hodges says. It pays to let interns know that their assignments play an important role. "When you show students you're taking this relationship seriously, you get a similar level of professional attitude and commitment in return," he says.

Slowing Intern Economy
Still, many companies have put their internships on hold for this year, as they struggle through the economic downturn, says Wendell Phipps, executive assistant to the director for Johns Hopkins University's Information Security Institute. While the Baltimore university's computer-science internship program will grow this year--20 interns are expected to be placed, compared with last year's 14--it won't meet its original goal. "We were hoping to double the number of interns, but a lot of companies have said they're just not doing it this summer," Phipps explains.

That's not the case at eOriginal, which never considered cutting back its program. The company will have three Java-savvy interns this year--the same number of interns it had last year. "The value proposition is a great one," Whitmore says, pointing out that while the internships are paid, it's less than the salary eOriginal would pay for a software engineer fresh out of school.

Northrop Grumman isn't just keeping its program, it's expanding it. The company's electronic sensors and systems sector had 10 IT interns last year, and this year, at least 15 will work on projects that include intranet and internal networking applications. Success for those internships isn't based on completing an entire project. Hodges points out that few of the company's projects will start and stop at convenient moments for students to participate. "Whether or not an entire task can get done in the summer isn't critical," he says. "But it's important to have incremental milestones--so at end of summer, students and their teams can evaluate success against a plan."

Companies such as eOriginal and Northrop have benefited from internships; still, interns can leave unwanted handiwork in the darnedest places. That's what one software consultant learned when he interviewed at Microsoft about 10 years ago.

As part of its technical interviews, Microsoft provided candidates with contrived programming examples to optimize, the consultant--whom we'll call Bill--says. "Since I knew that, I had printed out an assembly listing of part of their C 5.0 runtime library--two or three of the string functions," he says. "I asked the guy interviewing me to optimize the code while I optimized the stuff he'd given me. Turn-about is fair amongst geeks." After looking at the code, the interviewer asked, "Where did you find this?" When Bill told him, the interviewer brought up the runtime code on screen--and started cursing. An intern had written much of the runtime library, the interviewer said, and nobody had checked the work before Microsoft shipped it. The consultant said, "It was probably the most entertaining interview I've ever had."

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