The Intern Official

Last month, our team welcomed two interns. One is twenty-one, halfway through a computer science degree. The other is fifty-three, halfway through a career pivot after his manufacturing plant closed.

We treated them differently. I’m not proud of it, but it’s true.

The older intern struggled with the speed of things—the group chat that never sleeps, the three back-to-back Zoom calls, the unwritten rule that you answer emails at 9 PM. He needed someone to say, “Here’s how we work, not just what we work on.” The Intern

Both assumptions were wrong. The younger intern struggled with confidence, but he learned our analytics platform in one afternoon. He caught a bug no one else had seen. He just needed someone to tell him, “It’s okay to speak up.”

With the fifty-three-year-old, we assumed the opposite. We gave him client calls, project ownership, and a seat at the leadership meeting by week two. We didn’t assign him a “buddy.” We figured he didn’t need one. Last month, our team welcomed two interns

With the twenty-one-year-old, we assumed we’d have to explain everything: how to write a professional email, how to show up on time, how to ask for feedback. We gave him the “intern projects”—the spreadsheet cleaning, the meeting minutes, the low-stakes tasks.

It works. Not because one is smarter. Because they’re both learners . We treated them differently

Not because they’re incapable. Because the territory changes faster than any of us admit. We’ve started pairing our interns—young and old, first-career and second-act. They teach each other. The twenty-one-year-old shows the fifty-three-year-old how to automate a report. The fifty-three-year-old shows the twenty-one-year-old how to run a meeting without an agenda descending into chaos.