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3 Favorite (Selfish) Reasons I Invest in Interns…

Tom Whitehill

We intuitively know that internships help the intern. But here are some selfish reasons internships help me…👇🏻



#1: Mentoring makes me feel good.

Acts of altruism feel good, and they are necessary. 


Through micro actions, I believe I can make a difference. 


When I distill stories and lessons from my career successes and failures and share them with a young person, we both get a boost of social and professional connection.


I think that makes a difference.


And the downstream effects of guiding a young person during the complexity of their early career can be profound.


I say this because, as a student, I was on receiving side of this transaction.

By the time I graduated from engineering school, I had amassed 23 months of internship experience - under Mary Austin, at Pratt & Whitney in Middletown, Connecticut, and Ulrike Mader, at Siemens, in Regensburg, Germany.  Under Mary’s mentorship, I was given my first significant ownership in a software system.

It was an internal system related to a metal spray process. Creating my part of the system validated my classroom computer science knowledge as powerful and, when applied to a real world challenge, valuable.

Two years later, under Ulli’s mentorship in Germany, my engineering scope grew and my contributions played out on a bigger stage. I was asked to customize an automobile computer interface system I had created. Ultimately, it was deployed at the Internationale Automobil-Ausstellung in Frankfurt, before an audience of around 1,000,000, where it automated Siemens’ convention floor demonstration booth. 

More importantly, my close friendships with Ulli and other Siemens colleagues who took me under their wing, I learned about Europe and Asian cultures and shed my ethnocentric naïveté. I saw the value of thinking and behaving like a citizen of the world, rather than of a single country.

My selfish hope is to give back to the system of internship and create personal growth opportunities to students of this generation.

#2: Mentoring makes me a better leader.

An intern needs a teacher, a coach and a caring listener - and not necessarily in that order.

On paper, these roles read as theoretically reasonable.

In the reality, however, the sense of responsibility I feel can be daunting when I stand in the spotlight of an expectant intern’s gaze. 


It just so happens that these skills are the same an aspiring engineer needs to improve to attain the next career level, as technical team leader, architect, director and CTO. Mentoring an intern has been a way for me to practice the art of leading a team of engineers.


 #3: I love being friends with great people.


A superficial friend of mine once joked that he was looking for some new friends. 


He had only three requirements: his new friends (as compared to his current friends, I assumed) had to be ‘younger, wealthier and better looking’.


I momentarily put on a project manager's hat and quipped, ‘That’s a great wish and I’ll grant it, but you get to pick only two out of three’.


Relationships with interns are never superficial.


Interns require regular and often intense discussion. They deserve long sessions diagramming on white boards. They need guidance in problem decomposition and how to defend technical arguments calmly against someone with 30 years of experience.


And sometimes they just need to chat about their life and problems.


Or an hour to play chess or talk about history, travel, food, fussball or cricket.


And more often than not I’ve become friends with ‘my’ interns.


Recently, I had a virtual reunion with one of my interns from 25 years ago. He’s nearing 50 now - not to be believed - and, despite our advances in age, my emotions flooded with an uncle’s pride as he told me about his amazing career and asked me questions about mine.


He’s just one of the great friends I have made by mentoring interns and I hope to make more.


Investment-wise, there are plenty of reasons internships make sense, and I hope you've enjoyed my favorite selfish ones.


Maybe this means that selfishness can be good.


Especially if it benefits our bright, young people in this bizarre era of societal disrup