Sponsorship and Management
The two things that the student internship program (SIP) manager must grapple with are funding (i.e., sponsorship) and management. Experience at the Harvard Green Campus Initiative has shown that the best way to run a SIP is to have a separation of the sponsorship and management roles, whereby sponsoring departments provide funding and advise but do not manage the interns. The reasons for this are as follows:
- Sponsors are not always able to grasp the level and style of intern management required in order to ensure success.
- Sponsors are often not far enough along in developing their own internal understanding of campus environmental sustainability to provide the necessary intern training in the challenge of achieving organizational change for sustainability.
- Sponsors are typically not willing or able to invest in the continuation of the intern's work (beyond the initial internship term) unless a cost-effective strategy is proposed. The work of developing such a strategy usually needs to be undertaken by a third party, because staff are too busy.
The benefits of having the interns reporting to a SIP manager who resides outside of the sponsoring departments are numerous:
- By having a single manager for interns across several departments, the college or university can benefit from the evolution of the manager's own experience and expertise.
- The SIP can develop a highly valuable and widely accessible central resource comprised of interns' final reports and other products.
- The SIP manager can bring an important new perspective to the sponsoring departments, which will maximize the value they gain from the program.
- The SIP manager can work to increases the chances for continuation and further development of the internship projects.