Your mentee opens the call with news. Their team is taking on a summer intern, and their manager has asked them to be the intern's mentor. They sound pleased and slightly alarmed. Then they ask the question you half expected. Can you tell me how you do it, so I can do the same?
It is a lovely compliment, and it is worth gently turning down. What works between the two of you grew out of your personalities, your history and a relationship that took months to build. Copied onto someone else, it will feel borrowed, and the intern will notice. Your job now is not to hand over a method. It is to help your mentee find their own.
Start by asking what they remember. What did somebody do for them in their first months that actually helped? What did someone do that made them feel small? Those two lists are a better starting guide than anything you could write for them, because they come from the intern's side of the table.
Help them think about the first week in practical terms. Where will the intern sit, who will they meet, what small real task can they finish by Friday? Interns are often given either nothing or everything. A single piece of work with a clear end is kinder than both.
Then step back, which is the hard part for you. Do not offer to join their sessions or check on the intern yourself. If the intern starts coming to you, send them back. Your mentee needs to be the person the intern trusts, and they cannot become that with you standing behind them.
What you can offer is a place to talk it through afterwards. Every couple of weeks, ask how it is going and listen for the moments they found difficult. The intern who never asks questions. The one who asks forty a day. The awkward silence when the intern's code was not good enough. Talk about what they tried, not what you would have done.
Expect your own conversations to change too. Someone who is teaching for the first time starts to see their own learning differently, and you may find they arrive with better questions than before.
Watching someone you mentored begin to mentor is one of the quiet rewards of the role. Let it be theirs.
– Asael Shinder
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