The image of an earnest college student serving coffee, making copies, and filing paperwork is a common internship trope. There’s an underlying message that interns have to put in their fair share of grunt work before they actually get to contribute to projects that are meaningful or important. Essentially, they have to earn it. The thing is, it doesn’t have to be this way. Relegating interns to menial tasks doesn’t really help the student learn, and it also doesn’t allow the company to benefit from the intern’s full range of talent and ideas.

That being said, it’s also not a great idea to assign weighty, difficult, or complex work to an intern if they don’t yet have the skills and experience to accomplish the task.

It can be challenging to find internship tasks that fall between these two extremes. I find that the best assignments for interns are the items that I keep on my wish list.

I’m not sure if others do this, but a few years ago I started keeping a list titled, “When I have time…” It’s a list of ideas that I would love to explore given more time and energy, but I admittedly never quite get to a place where I can fully dive into those projects. It includes things like:

• Write a blog/LinkedIn post on a particular topic
• Do a deep analysis of data and outcomes from this past year
• Create an operations manual for my programs
• Start a podcast
• Assemble a bank of stock photos for future use
• Get ahead on event planning for the coming year
• Do a full audit of our website to ensure information is up to date

These kinds of items make for great internship tasks. Interns can meaningfully contribute to your work, and will learn about your organization in the process. You could even offer the list to the intern as a menu of options, and allow them to pick out the projects that are most interesting to them.

As you assign projects to the intern, it’s important to be extremely clear about your expectations. What should the finished project look like? What resources, background information, and supports will they need for success? Who might be their collaborators? Keep in mind that their goals should be SMART:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Realistic
• Time-Bound