The ATA Chronicle - July/August 2017 - 19

local universities from which you recruit
interns. In our case, the local university
uses a 10-week quarter system, which
means we begin our internship cycle
about 10 weeks before the academic
quarter begins. Our entire cycle lasts 20
weeks. Thus, we're always planning for
the next internship simultaneously while
overseeing the current one.
There are five phases to our
internship cycle:
■■

Project development

■■

Recruiting, interviewing, and scheduling

■■

Onboarding

■■

Training, daily mentorship, evaluation,
and feedback

■■

Transition

Project Development: In the project
development phase, the director identifies
a need or desire in a particular area of
the organization and collaborates with
individuals in that area to create an
appropriate project for the intern. For
example, for one internship project,
I listened to the people involved with
vendor management discuss the need to
train translators and layout specialists
on what elements make a piece more
or less comprehensible and how to
measure the reading level of a document.
I collaborated with vendor management
to determine the scope of the training
materials to be researched and developed.
I also had one person commit to serve as a
subject area expert who would work with
the intern on these materials.
I then created a syllabus for the
internship with input from the area expert
in vendor management. The syllabus
included the contact information for
human resources, the mentor, and the
subject area expert. It also listed the
objectives for the internship (that the
intern could take to their university
advisor), expectations, a project overview,
a calendar, and timeline.
Recruiting, Interviewing, and
Scheduling: I then turned to human
resources for the recruiting, interviewing,
and scheduling phase. We collaborated
to create the recruiting announcement for
a readability intern, which was posted at
the internship centers of local universities.
The human resources department also set
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organized initial training sessions with
our marketing team for each of these
subunits and designated area experts to
be available in case the intern got stuck
or had questions. For daily mentorship,
I had a five-minute conversation with
the intern at the end of each day, where
I asked her to summarize what she had
learned. Finally, I gave her consistent
feedback during these conversations, as
well as more formal input at the end of
each subunit.

The key to leading a projectbased internship program is the
internship director/mentor.
up interviews so that the vendor manager
and I could interview the three finalists.
Onboarding: Like the recruiting,
interviewing, and scheduling phase, the
onboarding phase relies heavily on the
expertise and processes of the human
resources department as the intern is
brought on as an employee. There is
evidence to suggest that greater proactivity
and productivity are correlated to greater
attention being placed on employee
socialization.3 In other words, interns feel
more accepted and valued when they're
accorded the same attention as other
incoming employees.
Training, Daily Mentorship, Evaluation,
and Feedback: The bulk of an internship
involves constant planning, training, and
assessment with feedback. For example,
when we brought on an intern who
cleaned up our sales leads database,
we had already identified smaller units
within the larger project, such as merging
duplicate sales lead entries and annotating
leads by industry and specialization. I

Transition: The final stage in the
internship cycle is the transition stage,
in which the intern prepares to leave the
organization. Most importantly, this is
when the employees who stand to benefit
from the work accomplished prepare to
make use of the information produced.
For example, one of our interns was
tasked with comparing manual glossary
creation with automatic term extraction.
The report she produced at the end of her
internship wouldn't have been of much
value had there not been a plan in place
for how to use it after her departure.
To facilitate this transition, the intern
wrote a final reflection and a handover
document. The final reflection benefits
both the intern and the organization.
In this case, the intern produced a
summary of her activities that she could
take to her university advisor. We were
left with information such as the dates
of the internship and a description of
the project, along with the documents
produced during the project. The
handover document often contains links
to files or screenshots demonstrating
what was accomplished and where to find
the fruits of the labor. Thus, when our
glossary comparison intern left, we knew
exactly where to find her report and could
immediately make value-adding decisions
on whether manual or automatic term
extraction made sense for various
localization projects.
In each of the examples above-the
readability internship, the sales leads
internship, and the glossary internship-
there is a common set of criteria: a
well-defined, short-term, value-adding,
mutually beneficial set of coherent
activities centering around a single topic,
theme, or goal, with training, evaluation,
and feedback built in. These interns
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19
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