Best work to give interns?

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February 06, 2023

by a searcher from Harvard University - Harvard Business School in New York, NY, USA

Searchers: in your experience, what has been the best type of work to give interns? I started out having interns build company lists. I'm now considering shifting the focus to having them help personalize emails. (I think that's where my bottleneck is)

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Reply by a searcher
from Rice University in Houston, TX, USA
Agree with ^redacted‌ that direction is critical. Took me some time, but I drew out process maps, scripts, and distributed to the group. As far as work: I've given interns industry research, lead analysis and identification (going through a list of leads and determining which ones are valuable, why, and presenting to the team); some financial modeling (I hold courses). Some broker correspondence and some CIM analysis/feedback. We're on Slack so we discuss different deals and put together questions for sellers. Hold weekly meetings/lessons (called "skills sessions"). Some comp analysis. Guest speakers are great. I record all of our skills sessions and meetings and upload them to our drive.
Personalized emails is a big one for me too - I'm working with a programmer to help with that now (results TBD).
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Reply by a professional
from Université de Bourgogne in Valladolid, España
I think that it depends on what are your general objectives ( are they technical interns, like engineers? or less specialized interns?)
The best advice that I can give you is to think macro, do some optimization of your processes.


Where is your bottleneck? (usually, a bottleneck can be identified by the amount of work that a place has, the more work there is, the chance that we have a bottleneck there)
If you place some interns in the bottlenecks, it would be good for your organization in general.

However, remember that:

1. Placing interns without experience will make things slower for a few weeks until they learn what to do
2. If there is an excess of inventory/something, it means that there is an excess of capacity!, you can use those resources s to alleviate your bottleneck.
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