This is a summary of program activities. See also Intern Policies and Procedures

Where to find materials

Internship files are organized on the H drive H:\Research Branch\Interns, Fellows, STI\Internship Program
1. Each year is grouped in a folder - pre-2020 they were separated summer and semester. There is always more organization and information in the folders that have summer internships.
  1. The summer time period folder will generally contain, at a minimum, the summer internship summary spreadsheet, information from the call for intern ideas, a folder of project descriptions, and a folder for procurement/tasks
2. From 2019 onward, all invoices are contained in a standalone folder. Prior to that, invoices are in the folder with their activity period.
Forms and such are primarily in a Google Drive folder . Stephanie Dock (Unlicensed) kathleen.crabb and the generic ddothr@gmail has access to that folder. Link above also grants access.
Some materials are stored in OneDrive, though that should largely be reserved for items that the university partner needs access to as well. Stephanie Dock (Unlicensed) has a folder shared with kathleen.crabb and DDOT Research.

As of late summer 2021, there is some clean-up needed between the One Drive and the H Drive locations

Recruitment

Intern Interest Form

Students, professors, and others who are interested in being made aware when internships are posted can submit their information here. The form and responses are in the Google folder.

Periodically (usually before the next call is put out) update the response spreadsheet to

drag down the "valid until" and email count formulas.
1. NOTE: professors and career offices should have their end date set to 2050 or something appropriately far off
2. If email count >1, figure out the most recent listing and delete older ones
note any interns in the list who have already interned (add a "yes" for any that have)
flag local vs. non-local (yes/no)
1. Exact cut-off for local varies, but generally try to do institutions that students can reasonably commute to DDOT from. Essentially within the commuter rail range (so Baltimore is in, Richmond is out).
add a cleaned institution name - this is used in the stats sheet and allows quick summaries of the range of students we are reaching via this outreach list.

When new postings are put up, send a notification to all the relevant students (semester are generally only send to local students) on BCC from the DDOT Research email account.

Tracking

Intern Team

In Microsoft Teams there is a team named "Interns". Owners of the team are currently Stephanie Dock (Unlicensed), kathleen.crabb, and Former user (Deleted).

As interns start, leave, or change managers, one of the owners should go in an update the membership list to reflect current interns and their current managers (on the Teams tab, click the 3 dots next to the team name and then click "manage team"). There are tags 'managers' and 'interns' that should be applied as appropriate.

Interns and their managers are welcome to create their own channels for their projects. If someone has created a channel, check with them about the content before removing both the intern and manager from the team at the end of the internship.

Check-in Form

Form & Responses

Interns and managers are expected to check in weekly. This process was implemented in summer 2021 during the virtual internships to ensure things issues were caught quicker after previously relying on biweekly check-ins. A reminder is sent to the intern team (interns and managers separately) every Thursday morning to remind people to fill in the form, as a reply to an original message posted in 2021. We remind on a Thursday in case folks aren't in on Friday. The reminder is sent via a Power Automate flow from Stephanie Dock (Unlicensed). The flow can be edited by Stephanie Dock (Unlicensed),kathleen.crabb, and the DDOT Research account.

Form and reminders

At the start of each semester or as interns start or leave:

Update the interns in the form: Go into the form and update the intern list to reflect who needs to be responding. The intern names are listed so that the tracking can be automated.
Update the reminder in Teams: Go into Power Automate (from OneDrive or Outlook online, click the 9 dots in the upper left corner. If Power Automate isn't showing, select "all apps" below the icons). Under My Flows > Shared with me there should be "Intern reminder" and "Manager reminder." Click the one you want to update and then choose edit flow (top left) For interns this can only be done once their DDOT email account and Teams access has been set up.
1. To add a new person:
  1. copy one of the existing "Get (name)" steps, then click the "+" below one of the current "get name" steps and in the choose an operation box that pops up, go to my clipboard (far right) and select the copied action. Rename the action to the new person's name, and change the user to the ddot.dc.gov address for the new person.
  2. Update the last step for "post a reply to a message" - go to the end of the list of purple teams '@mention', put in a space, and then from the popup listing dynamic content, select the new person you've added above. If you mouse over the existing '@mention' listings, a popup will tell you which ones are there.
  3. If you are swapping someone out (e.g. a manager change), you can also just go in and rename the existing "Get (name)" steps and change the user it directs to. The last step (post a reply to a message) will automatically update.
  4. Hit save at the bottom. You can choose to test it immediately if you want, or just check the message on Thursday morning.
2. To remove a person: remove the "Get (name)" step in the flow. It will automatically also be removed from the last step (post a reply to a message). Hit save at the bottom, test if you're concerned it's not working

If Power Automate ever allows for pinging a tag ('@interns or '@managers, or just '@general) this whole process may be streamlined to just focus on updating the Team membership and make the automated reminder go to the proper '@' group rather than having to update the specific names each time. Would need to monitor for

Response Tracking

As of Fall 2020, the intern check-ins and payments are now tracked directly in the Google sheet, with a new tab for each semester. There is a good amount of conditional formatting in the document to allow for quick glance updates. Some fields only update once the Friday in question has passed. The split between summer and fall is often a bit flexible depending on task orders - for tasks ending with the fiscal year (the non-research local operating ones), it is easiest to continue tracking those interns through 9/30 on the summer tab and then move those interns to the fall tab once their new FY task has started. For research interns, the shift is often more logical once the full-time summer internships end sometime mid-August.

To set up a new semester tab, copy the prior semester tab and rework fields as needed. In general the summary listing of interns and the period start date (make sure it is a Monday or you'll need to update the first date under checked in) are the critical items to update to make other aspects flow through.

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