Learning With and From Interns
I’ve had the opportunity to be an intern and run an internship program with six bright students at the NMotion accelerator. The ultimate goal of an internship is to learn — for both the employer and student.

Internships are the purest form of experiential learning — if they are done right. This is what I’ve learned from both being a student and managing student talent.
Students need to learn…
by doing. What students are being taught in the classroom looks significantly different than applying and practicing the skills in real life. Nothing else in this post can be accomplished without experiential learning.
My classmate, Colton Siebert started a sales internship this summer at Hudl. He shadowed other members of the sales team and did a ton of research about the products. Colton was pushed to start calling early on because he could only learn to make a sale through experience. When he was on the phone with clients, he truly started grasping the sales process.
professionalism. Employer expectations are much different than what is expected of students in any other culture or environment. This ranges from being on time, knowing how to dress, networking, taking notes, being prepared, directing questions, interviewing, negotiating, and so much more. Most of these skills aren’t expectations until you hit the workforce and first-time interns will most likely not have them yet.
The two design interns at NMotion this summer were completing projects for six different teams — a hard task to manage. They started out having to redo designs, but after a few mistakes they developed a design process to gain feedback and communicate. Christina said, “Not only did I learn to ask questions quickly, I learned how to ask the right questions.”
problem solving. This is essential in the startup world and something that every intern needs to be successful in a startup internship. Interns need to be challenged to think like they are solving a problem before they ask questions.
One of my firsts tasks as an intern was creating a SlideShare for Liberty Mobility Now. I had never done any design, so as a default, I began using Powerpoint. My finished Powerpoint product was not professional, and I went back to the drawing board. The next day I taught myself InDesign through tutorials and by the end of the summer was able to design an entire pitch deck for the NMotion Demo Day Showcase.
independence. Being cued in college with assignment dates, study guides, and guided curriculum is not the way the real world works. Interns must be able to work on their own, make decisions on their own, and be an employee on their own.
One of the business interns, Connor was tasked with helping an NMotion founder create a business plan for a grant. This was a huge task and Connor utilized Google, an intern’s best friend. He completed the project in his 12-hour week and learned what the state is looking for in grant applications.

Employers need to learn…
age doesn’t matter, potential does. Age is not a determinant for a student’s potential. Employers miss out on talent when they judge an intern by their age. Employers do not need to put an age on internship applications.
I started out studying accounting at the University of Nebraska. I didn’t apply for an accounting internship once because applicants were required to be a junior or older. A few weeks later I was elected as my sorority’s treasurer, where I now manages the sorority’s finances, run financial statements every month, and execute on the budgets of over 20 officers.
how to do it first. As a founder or manager, you must always know how to do the work before you assign it to someone else. There are instances where creativity from interns is essential. But, after watching many startups work with interns, the successful projects are the ones where founders already have the know how. A project was never successful if an employee did not know how to complete it first.
One of the NMotion founders assigned our storytelling intern, I Coleman, the task of creating new messaging. This ended up being a fun project for I, but the task started out without any parameters. A lot of time was wasted trying to determine the end deliverables. Ultimately, a new boilerplate and slogans were created; the founder did get new messaging, but it took double the time. The project would have been much more streamlined if the founder knew what he wanted first.
to think from the intern’s perspective. The communication of a task or project is the lifeblood of its success. You know every inch of your company as a founder, but interns do not and you must explain projects from that perspective.
The NMotion interns were tasked with putting up new vinyl logos on the office wall. The design interns prepared the files. Then, the business interns used a vinyl cutter at a maker’s space and came home with the finished product. The only problem — the finished product was double the size of every other logo that was already on the wall. We learned fast and a spec sheet was created so that every team had to think through their tasks and write down the specifics, including the file dimensions. The interns had new logos on the wall the next week and a spec sheet for every project they would complete.
to work with employees. Hiring interns is a great way to practice taking on employees and contractors. Working with employees and interns is challenging and you must be willing to learn as an employer to make it successful.
After the first week of our internship program, the NMotion team reviewed the tasks our interns had completed. One task was to create a startup welcome guide for Lincoln, Nebraska. Three separate interns began working on three separate welcome guides — and no one realized until the end of the week. We then implemented a giant scrum board so the interns could track their projects and still remain transparent with the different teams. It evolved over the life of the program and was essential to our successful project management.

Running an internship program is challenging. Throughout the summer I’ve made mistakes when working with our interns, but those mistakes are what helped to make the program a success. Working with NMotion’s six interns has taught me that employers can learn so much from and with interns.
Keep reading this series to learn more about running an internship program and working with student talent.
