How to Start an Intern Program at an Early Stage Startup | Part 1: Structure the Program
Top things to consider when setting up an intern program from scratch — directly from someone who’s built and run one for the past 2+ years 🎓
👋🏼 Hey! I run a HealthTech/EdTech SaaS startup called Frenalytics.We make personalized learning software for patients with cognitive deficits and students with learning disabilities. This four-part series on starting an intern program is written for startup founders and operators, and shares my advice from launching our own intern program. I hope you find it useful!
As someone far wiser than me once said, “The hardest part of any important task is getting started on it in the first place.” If you’re a startup founder or operator reading this, congrats — you’ve likely already done this by building out (perhaps an early version of) your own product or service. 🙌🏼
If you’re now looking to explore how to integrate one or more intern students into your company, this how-to guide will aim to share some pointers on how to “get started” again — this time, on building a successful intern program based on your company’s needs. I’ll use our startup, Frenalytics, and lessons learned from our own intern program as examples of things to consider doing (or not doing) — feel free to adapt as you see fit.
Part 1 — this post — focuses on structuring your new intern program.
Ask Yourself Why
Before you begin, ask yourself, Why? Why are you interested in creating an intern program?
For us, this goes back to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. As COVID ravaged the country and the world in the early half of 2020, like many, our plans got completely upended. Since our target consumer base at the time — nursing homes, stroke rehab centers, and homecare agencies — became inundated and crippled by COVID-positive patients, we had to rethink our product development and marketing strategies. An interesting post from Amy Donegan, Assistant Dean of Undergraduate Career Advising at Boston College caught my attention:
When students left Boston College (my alma mater) in mid-March 2020 due to COVID, many had to leave their summer internship offers behind too, and not by choice — you may recall top companies around the world rescinding their internship offers to students or outright canceling internship programs altogether, in addition to massive layoffs and furloughs that affected millions.
Amy’s online survey felt like a valuable way for us to show fellow BC students the ropes and expose them to the fascinating world of startups. I knew with our small team’s passion and love for paying it forward, we’d have a lot to share with those interested in learning.
If you can ask yourself a similar Why? question and formulate a compelling answer, you’ll not only build better bones for your intern program, but you’ll also be able to share this directly with students who are considering your opening among other startup opportunities they may come across.
Structure the Program
Next up: You’ll want to ask yourself some questions to steer the direction (and formality) of your intern program:
- What existing roles on your team would be strengthened by having a student intern join? However scrappy your startup may be, students want to be learning from one or more mentors, not filling an obvious gap that a paid employee or contractor should be in. (For us, especially with many one-person teams at the beginning, we’ve had interns join with interests in everything ranging from sales & marketing to software development and QA testing to business development. For our inaugural program, based on our more immediate focus on product development and marketing strategy, we mainly brought on students who were interested in these areas.)
- How many interns do you want? Just one, or several? (For us, we started with 4, which was probably too many in hindsight, especially with limited planning. Your reflection on #1 above will likely answer this question.)
- Will you run an unpaid, paid, or mixed program? (For us, we run an unpaid intern program and have hired out it in the past, but to comply with US labor laws, we have students sign an agreement to document the educational nature of our program and how it doesn’t necessarily result in employment post-program.)
- When should students begin and end their internship? (For us, our Why? above referenced summer internship offers for college students being rescinded, and so we had our inaugural program begin in the summer and run through mid-August. Our semester-based programs follow a typical college semester schedule.)
- What’s your comfort level with interns being exposed to, and working on, real problems within your company? Depending on your industry, local labor laws, and your own personal threshold, you may want interns working on merely theoretical assignments, or you may want them working on real deliverables. (For us, it’s very important that interns make contributions they feel are valuable, and we promote a culture of learning by doing across our entire company.)
- What tools do you use now — or want to use — that interns should also get access to? (For us, we grant access to Notion, Slack, and a @frenalytics.com email to all interns, and we provision access to other tools like Jira, Azure DevOps, and our CRM based on an intern’s role.)
- What goals will the company have with interns on board? What goals will the company have for the interns on board? How do these complement each other? (For us, we’re still figuring out the best way to set goals, but a new system we’re piloting for our Summer 2022 program is an onboarding form that asks each new intern their personal goals for their time with us.)
Share with Your Team
I’d recommend you give your team a heads up that you plan to launch an intern program in the near future. Whether it’s one student to start or several, this will not only give your staff a chance to prepare personally and professionally, but it will also offer them a chance to participate. As an example, after reviewing candidates for our Summer 2022 program and realizing we didn’t have any applicants with an interest in UI/UX design, our Lead Product Designer, Caitlyn, shared a tweet that led to nearly two dozen additional applications!
A Quick Legal Note
While unpaid internship programs are considered legal under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) when specific criteria are met, be sure to structure your intern program — and classify interns as paid employees as appropriate — in accordance with FLSA and other local laws. This article is for general information and should not be considered legal advice.
Wrap-up
In Part 1 of this how-to guide, we talked about:
- Asking yourself Why? you want to begin an intern program at your startup
- Setting up the structure of the program — number of students, duration, types of roles interns would support, what kinds of problems you’re comfortable with interns being exposed to, work & collaboration tools, and company + intern goals
- Letting your team know about your plans for an upcoming intern program, so they can prepare (and also participate if they’d like!)
Part 2: Source & Interview Students →
In Part 3 (coming early July), I’ll discuss how to actually kick off the program, and what considerations you’ll want to have throughout the internship’s duration.
Finally, Part 4 (coming mid-July) will cover how to collect feedback to improve your program for students who join in the future.
👋🏼 Thanks for reading! Please feel free to share your feedback or reach out with any thoughts: matt@thinkgroupholdings.com
