Related Pages in this Manual
- Green Living Program: Reporting & Communication & Measuring & Reporting Successes
Institutional Memory
To maximize the effect of a student internship program (SIP), it is crucial to capture, catalogue and disseminate the results of interns’ work in a systematic manner. Before an intern leaves your organization, you must receive the resources they have compiled and that will ensure the continued momentum of the project. Be sure to encourage student interns to write down the project story, including the context, how the work progressed and where it needs to go, all of which can add interest for the reader.
From day one it is important for the student intern to have a clear structure and a timeframe for documenting and presenting their findings. It works well if the internship is geared around the development of one final document and one final 10- to 20-minute Powerpoint presentation. In both cases, it is wise to require the intern to provide drafts by the second to the last week of the internship so that you can review and help finalize them. The Harvard Green Campus Initiative has found that intern Powerpoint presentations are perhaps the most useful product because they are very succinct and reader-friendly.
If you have access to an appropriate website, this can be an ideal place to put your interns' final project documents. Alternatively, you can archive information on an office computer or elsewhere, retrieving it when it is needed for specific audiences or projects. The information on the website would be for public consumption. The information in the archives could be made available to the public on request, but some of it might be for program staff eyes only.
Make sure that interns know the purposes for which they will be preparing documents and organizing their work. It will save time and effort if interns can craft their documents and other materials according to the intended end use, rather than altering them at a later time.