For many, summer internships open exciting new doors to the professional world. Often times, interns are students or recent graduates who are eager to get their feet wet with experience. It can be a bit overwhelming -- interns are fed a lot of information, meet and network with tons of new people, and some are even living in an entirely new city! Many companies wonder: How can I make the internship experience smoother and more enjoyable? After all, if the interns prove themselves to be great assets, you’d certainly want them returning to your organization after they graduate or when the internship is over. An internship app is a great way to provide a fun, engaging, and convenient guide to the ins-and-outs of your company’s internship program. Let’s take a look at Guidebook’s very own summer internship app! Everything Interns Need to Know (Besides Just Where to get Coffee) Guidebook’s internship program runs about ten weeks and since many of the interns are not from the Bay Area, we provide all the in’s and out’s of living in San Francisco, as well as exciting information about the program to get our interns ready for the summer. Making sure our interns are set up for success and that they feel like full-time employees is a huge priority for Guidebook, so we make sure to put a lot of care into how we set up our internship programs, including what information we put in our app! Here are some things we’ve included in our internship guide:

• Events & Schedules. With so much going on during the summer, we make sure to provide as much notice on our calendar as possible. The event schedule is where we give information about our intern presentations, company events (Guidebook Olympics, company trips, happy hours, etc.), executive meet-ups, and other important events.
• Mentor & Intern Information. Internships are a great chance to network, so we make sure to provide contact and job title information for all of our current employees, which makes meeting tons of new people a lot more seamless.
• Maps and POIs. While our interns could certainly Google or Yelp interesting places to visit, we like to provide them with some of our favorite local spots in the city. From restaurants to coffee joints, we make sure to provide them with as much local knowledge as possible.

Guidebook’s internship guide has been a big hit since we implemented it a few years ago, and it continues to be the main source for information for many of our interns! "We built out a guide that helps onboard them so we include all sorts of information about the intern program so they can get to know each other and their mentors while receiving details of all the events we have planned for them," said Irin Son, Head of Human Resources at Guidebook. "We also include resources they’d need during their summer stay such as a neighborhood map to a list of interesting places in the city and a public transportation guide. The guide is a perfect way for HR to manage information sharing and get feedback from both interns and mentors as the season progresses through the survey module. It’s also a great idea to introduce your company’s product whenever you have the opportunity." Interested in creating an app to step up your internship program? Click the button below to start building with our intern app template!