Supervising and Being an Intern - training the trainer

In my evening class for Internship, we have an excellent professor who offers pointed advice and generous support. We speak about our weekly experiences, problems, questions, successes. It is a fantastic group of women in the class and a very supportive environment.

What I took away from last night's class discussion, was that we all, at times, feel like the 16 year old kid at our first job. The boss barks out from his or her office to get a cup of coffee and you are like, sure.....where's the coffee pot? or how do I use this thing? or omg, why am I making this guy/gal coffee? I came here to learn how to ____________(fill in the blank). Not be a waitress!

So, as it turns out, some internships are better than others. Some internship supervisors are better at training interns than others. I am lucky. My supervisor is always available when I ask for some of her time. She has been as accommodating as possible, and has been kind when I have asked for experiences that she cannot supply due to confidentiality issues. I am sure in the future I will look back at some of my questions and realize I was asking for inappropriate things. But hey - sometimes learning takes the form of mistakes.

And it is truly up to me what I make of it.

At one point last night, I felt frustrated by one of my classmates. She and her supervisor have not really gelled and it sounds like a tense situation for both. This classmate has had several weeks of sharing with us her frustrations. I finally said last night that I thought she should relax and lower her expectations of the experience. We are really as much there to observe as we are to practice.

however, this morning, I was thinking about her again and realized maybe I was wrong. We should set the highest of expectations for our internships. If the site supervisor signed up for this, they too should set their expectations just as high. However, the reality is, these folks are busy. Some, on overload. Maybe they never received training on how to train?

If you are supervising an intern, how have you tried to make this experience meaningful for your intern and for your department?