Internship guide/Best practices for mentors

From Nasqueron Agora

Context and experience

Nasqueron is a small-size open-source project and free culture community. When we offer an internship, the outcome is really different based on the motivation and the level of the intern.

Our experience is based on 7 internships offered and it's only the second year we offer such a program, so the experience is based on a small dataset.

The ideal intern is:

  • self-directed
  • motivated
  • able to engage with the mentor

Remote / non-remote balance doesn't seem to matter — we had a lukewarm experience with an intern on-site and a stellar experience with a remote intern with big timezone difference. Our workflows allow remote connection.

Communication tools matter: we had good experiences with IRC and WhatsApp communication, mixed results on DevCentral integrated chat; we would like to experience what's going on with solutions like Mattermost/Zulip/Stoat/Slack/Discord.

The mentor seems to matter too:

  • Dorian and Dereckson looks hard to win — you need to be a good to very good contributor to gain their approval, either technically or with eagerness to learn.
  • Eli is clearly more open to help a newcomer to find their first steps and takes care not to overwhelm them.

Rules we'd like to follow in the future

  • Backup. We really need to have a backup mentor for each internship.
  • Remote or hybrid. A minimal number of days on-site isn't acceptable.
  • Experience. Projects engagement show we can provide a really more meaningful internship for experienced students.
  • Favour ops/security/network track. Internships in non-dev is rather hard to find, and Nasqueron tasks seem really infrastructure-oriented, so we can provide real projects, experience, knowledge and culture. That works and that works well (80% success), so that's we clearly bring something on the table here and an opportunity for interns to grow. For developers, it seems more complicated: our practices and infrastructure are clearly tailored for developers at ease with complicated tooling and workflows, and our project doesn't seem fit for newcomers, whatever we try — something also noticed on Wikimedia programs, where a lot of things were tried to improve engagement and success.
  • Initial engagement. Ideally, tooling training (arc/git workflow) should be offered beforehand. We should offer a small task to complete in that goal.
  • Communication. Continuous communication must occur: we need interns able to initiate the communication from their side too when needed, and with a backup mentor, both can also ensure communications from our side work well too.

Relations with education organisations

In Belgium, there are two kind of internships:

  • through IFAPME — really bureaucratic, but they seem to want to adapt to organisations needs
  • from superior schools and universities — either they don't care, either they clearly consider they can impose the rules

From France, we had problems with cases of on-site requirements during COVID-19 lockdowns.

Requirements from the school need to be taken in consideration:

  • what's the obligation of the mentor?
  • jury participation? lot of documents to fill?
  • is hybrid work acceptable?

Experience shows we need in the future to refuse interns from schools with on-site requirements.

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