Ride Huck Cycles CEO, Steve Amedio:
Many entrepreneurs like myself have a similar question regarding internships. “What makes for a productive internship.” It really could be expressed more pointedly as a problem statement. “How in the world can I make meaningful use of a young adult/student intern without it destroying my team’s productivity.”
Unfortunately the answer is usually heavily weighted towards the business’ ability to define meaningful work, at a discrete task level and dedicate a manager in the organization to the program. This means hyper efficient onboarding, multiple meetings a day and close scrutiny of the end product at each step in the process/project for the duration of the internship.
In steps Ben Deschamps.
Ben worked for me for several months as an intern. And I could say a lot of wonderful things about Ben. He is a pleasure to have around the office. But what made Ben a significant standout from other interns was his exceptional intellectual curiosity. Ben received no formal onboarding, was asked to work across a diverse portfolio of companies including tech, manufacturing and non-profit. He did so with limited direction. In fact, we simply needed to express strategic objectives for a particular project and simple guardrails such as time to complete and the nature of the output. This minimal direction was all Ben needed to create, important, insightful and impactful results. He contributed broadly to sales and marketing problem sets, addressing the full marketing and sales lifecycle. He implemented his plans effectively and within budget parameters. Ben thought critically about the stated objectives to ensure his work could be measured for its real impact. As it turns out, Ben wasn’t just an intern. He was a critical thinker with his own point of view and highly productive member of our team. I hope he learned something during his time with us, because we definitely learned a few things from Ben!
CareYaya Health Technologies CTO, Gavry Eshet:
We had the pleasure to work with Ben throughout his summer internship at Care Yaya. Ben was assigned a variety of projects across different parts of the business where we found him to be highly adaptable. His natural curiosity allowed him to get up to speed very quickly and without direction. One of his greatest strengths is innovative thinking to look at different ways to solve problems and create new opportunities. As a part of a team, Ben was very collaborative, open to new ideas, and thoughtful in how different solutions would impact the wider scope of the business.
Our team was very impressed with Ben and we have a high level of confidence that he is ready to step up to the challenge of a new role.