I've supervised more than twenty interns, all of whom were succesful as interns and are -- as best I can tell -- successful in their careers. This post summarizes my approach to mentoring, which boils down to (1) hire people then find projects that suite them, not the other way way around, and (2) do whatever it takes to make your interns successful, whether that means leaving them alone or sitting with them an hour or two a day.
I have hired 100% of the students who wanted to work for me or who were recommended to me, along with a number of others who I recruited because they had skills and interests that were aligned with my research activities. As I have never declined to hire an applicant, even an unofficial one, I have no idea how to do intern selection. What I can offer is my experience that everyone who wants to contribute can do so, given the right support, and it's up to the mentor to provide this. If you are not up to the challenge of making your interns successful no matter what, maybe you aren't ready to be a mentor.
It helps to have a rough idea of something you and your intern will do together (and various administrative functions often require it), but the details should be late binding and you should always been open to changing directions even circumstances require. I'll give an example of this later (it's in Summer of 2011).
I applied "Failure is not an option" to every one of my interns. I had a wonderful experience as an intern at PNNL (see this for details) and a lot of people were incredibly generous of their time to make that possible, and I chose to hold myself to a similar standard as a mentor.
The grading criteria I used for interns was as follows:
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Minimum success criteria. Whatever we need to accomplish for the internship to not be a complete waste of time. It needs to be something that is entirely within the skills the intern has already and can be achieved with straightforward effort, possibly requiring significant investment from the mentor. Nobody wants to be a failure, and succeeding at something straightforward gives people the confidence to take on bigger challenges.
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Very good results. This is a pretty standard success criteria, such as publishing a peer-reviewed manuscript to which the intern contributed significantly. It should be substantial enough that everyone will recognize the intern's contribution.
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Intergalactic science god. Yes, I actually used those words in some cases. I found that it was useful to provide an aspirational target for my interns that would keep them going if they managed hit level 2 relatively quickly. More importantly, I wanted them to know they I had a lot of confidence in their abilities and felt that there was a chance to accomplish something so profound that it would make them famous in the scientific community. It's important to have big dreams, even when you're an intern.
I didn't enumerate these criteria to every intern, but I had them in mind when I was designing their projects. I'm not sure how other mentors do it, but I like to think that it's somewhat novel to think about 1 and 3, and work really hard to make sure that every intern gets to 1 as quickly as possible, and hopefully to 2.
And if you are wondering, yes, my some of my students hit level 3. The work some of them did, often with very little help from me, changed their field of science and they are deservedly famous for it. At one point in my career, I spent a lot of time working on tensor-related things, but I found that some of my former interns are so much better at this topic than I am that I stopped working on it and found new areas to which I can contribute.
(c) Copyright Jeff Hammond, 2020. No reuse permitted except by permission from the author.