Advice for New Co-Op Supervisors

Overview

As WARG’s internship program expands and matures, there’s much to pass down from manager to manager about general advice, management, and how to interact with co-op students. Also, ignore the switch to 2nd person tense (lol).

As a lead in WARG, you demonstrated your ability to manage people and projects effectively. Being a co-op manager is an excellent way to hone mentorship skills. Many managers see the same key issues - this doc aims to address this.

General Advice

• Plan. Plan. Plan.

  • When we first hired interns, Sahil Kale and Shrinjay said “yo, we need people to build stuff, and co-ops are a good resource”. We had the right mentality, but we failed in execution- it lied in not specifying the “stuff” we wanted them to build. To address this, we insisted that every co-op henceforth had a dedicated project to work on, modelling ourselves on internship programs at actual companies. This was further iterated on with the requirement to make a startup guide when hiring: Co-op Hiring Process .

    • From Daniel: also important to focus on the learning opportunity for the intern rather than just what the team can get out of it.

  • When planning, remember that your co-op is expected to put in ~40 hours of work per week. In the context of a design team, this is a massive amount of people-hours relative to the rest of your team. Even the most dedicated leads punch a max of 20 hours a week to the team. Thus, a lot of new managers tend to underestimate the amount of work that a co-op can achieve. Be aware of this and plan accordingly when making timelines - don’t hesitate to be a touch on the aggressive side and scale back if needed since your intuition will likely push you to give more time than is needed as it is ‘calibrated’ to those of a regular member.

• Find people who can mentor them when you’re not around.

  • You are busy. You are a lead, you are their mentor, and you have other stuff to do. Daily 1:1’s are a requirement for co-ops, but it doesn’t mean you’re the only mentor to them. Use the ‘see one, do one, teach one’ model to build up your team member’s mentorship ability and alleviate your workload - win, win. You’ll know you’ve succeded when pings for “how do I do this” for certain matters stop flying your way and go to someone else

  • From @Anthony Luo , creating a co-op thread is excellent in giving a self-contained space for specific direction in a public-private manner.

• @Megan Spee ‘s advice for first time co op supervisors: quick tips and tricks to help you not choke on easy management decisions later

  • Define what days they have off (civic holidays?) and if reading week is off. Also define policy for taking days off (sick days, vacation, whatever. Can just be a ‘ask me, case by case basis' type of thing but specify that).

  • Define purchase protocols

  • Clearly outline expectations, if you can't support them enough for them to stick to these expectations, get help from other leads or re-define expectations

  • Be critical enough of their work that they learn but not critical enough that they get demotivated

    • Big point: they should be learning things whenever possible

  • Get them on confluence (or whatever documentation means you choose) early enough that the documentation is consistent through whole term

  • Safety training is very important get all those certificates + ASK FOR PDFs

• Make sure you're clearly aligned on the student's goal for the term and your expectations of their work.

  • Set deadlines that are reasonable given their skill level, and stick to them, and hold them accountable to these deadlines. If they are missing them or work isn’t being completed to your satisfaction, there may be a misalignment on expectations or ability that needs to be corrected ASAP.

• @Daniel Puratich random tips

  • Use tools:

    • Encourage use of confluence for documentation of projects

    • Use Asana (or any Jira like platform) to ensure your co-op knows what to do and has a timeline

    • Use a co-op thread in discord as Anni advises

    • Use a private google calendar to schedule in syncs and schedule in working hours

      • I liked to move the syncs around day to day to fit our schedule so being able to do it easily in a private shared gcal was very convenient.

  • frequent feedback

    • ensures everything is going in the right direction and everyone’s comfortable

    • bidirectional

    • synchronous

  • force questions

    • you really want ur co-op comfortable asking questions so you know where to fill knowledge gaps