3.C

Community-Serving Interns

While you are performing an individual internship you may still be part of a work team that has responsibilities or is working on a project. If so, your work team may want to consider assigning these team roles to use on your project. Even if you are not part of a defined work group during your internship, you can still identify specific workers in your company/organization that will be valuable for you to coordinate with or use as mentors and sources of expertise. You can consider them part of your team/co-workers during your internship. Many companies monitor how often you reach out to other employees as a signal of how well you will collaborate and learn in the future if they hire you.


Deliverables Manager

  • Directs project scope and deliverables negotiations with sponsor.

  • Heads group discussion on deliverables feasibility and workload commitment.

  • Writes an engagement letter after collecting input from the group and sponsor.

    • Delegates writing and editing tasks as needed.

  • Manages quality control and editing of final deliverables.

  • Maintains top-level perspective in team discussions.

  • Uploads the team Engagement Letter to Canvas and your Dashboard.

Project Manager

  • Keeps a journal of all reimbursable expenses and collects and turns in all receipts to TA.

  • Works with Administrative TAs to clear any reimbursements.

  • Crafts work plan from framework documented in the engagement letter.

    • Heads discussion on project tasks and deadlines.

    • Works with the team to assign tasks to individual team members.

    • Develop a Timeline calendar with key events, tasks, and deliverables.

    • Develops and maintains an Actions Register of responsible people/timing based on work plan and deliverables.

    • Follows up with team members on work plan assignments and implementation.

    • Prepares the work plan for upload to Canvas and your Dashboard.

    • Manages any changes made to the work plan.

    • Identifies and tracks project objectives and milestones/progress.

  • Approves completion of tasks outlined in the work plan.

Report Manager

  • Heads discussion on documentation and research strategy.

  • Heads discussion of analysis, conclusions, and recommendations.

  • Develops a preliminary report outline early in the process to direct work efforts.

  • Creates updates to the outline throughout the semester based on work process and findings.

  • Creates midterm and final report outlines.

  • Manages and delegates tasks for the creation of the midterm and final reports.

    • Tasks include formatting, writing, editing, graph creation, and so on.

  • Compiles, collates, and integrates midterm and final reports.

  • Gathers recommendations, conclusions, and key findings from the technical report.

  • Reaches team agreement on critical issues to be included in an executive summary.

  • Authors the executive summary based on the managerial presentation approach.

Sponsor Liaison

  • Maintains communication with the sponsor and coordinates weekly meeting times.

    • Be the primary contact with the client/sponsor of the project.

    • Monitor questions and responses between the team members and the sponsor.

    • Assure key sponsor contact is aware of any discussions/agreements with other client personnel.

  • Collects and publishes regular (weekly) work updates to the sponsor contact.

  • Moderates weekly team calls with the sponsor.

  • Heads creation of the Mid-Term and final presentations, delegating tasks as necessary.

    • Prepares agenda and any presentations for the sponsor kickoff meeting.

    • Develops a mid-term presentation of project progress and status.

    • Leads the development of the final presentation following the executive summary outline.

    • Manages any other presentations made to the sponsor.

  • Ensures submission of the final deliverables to the sponsor and uploads to Canvas and your Dashboard.

Team Leader

  • Leads team discussion on assigning team roles.

  • Schedules and leads weekly team meetings, which all members are required to attend.

    • Holds individual team members accountable for timely meeting attendance.

    • Reports non-compliance to Faculty/TAs so they can encourage involvement.

  • Backs up team members as needed in completing assigned tasks.

  • Helps team members understand roles.

  • Works individually with team members to ensure ownership of the project.

  • Acts as team liaison to the Faculty/mentor TA and Instructor Experiential Learning.

  • Ensures completion of role responsibilities for all team members.

    • Ensures that the Deliverables Manager submits an Engagement Letter.

    • Ensures that the Project Manager is scheduling and following up on tasks.

    • Ensures that Sponsor Liaison is maintaining regular sponsor contact and updates.

    • Ensures that the Report Manager makes assignments for and completes all reports.

  • Ensures all documents and meetings have been uploaded to Canvas and recorded on the Dashboard.


If you are truly working as an individual intern with no assistance from other students or co-workers then you may still want to review the team roles to determine if you are paying attention to all of the elements of your internship. In most internships, all of the tasks for each team member's role will still need to be accomplished even if you are the only one to do the tasks. You should review the team roles and identify each one that you want to make sure you accomplish during the internship.


This content is provided to you freely by Ensign College.

Access it online or download it at https://ensign.edtechbooks.org/projectbased_internships/communityserving_interns.