Having both been a summer intern and supervised summer interns since, I have followed the advice of the person who mentored me as a summer intern when it was ti

Having both been a summer intern and supervised summer interns since, I have followed the advice of the person who mentored me as a summer intern when it was time to work with my own: Choose a project you would do if you had time, but is off the critical path of your project plans, then help bring your intern up to speed on the nature of the problem you want to solve, make yourself available, and give them some breathing room. After that, I try to remove as much friction from the work process as possible - make sure they aren't handed the laptop from the bottom of the storage cabinet that is running an OS from 2002, have access to test servers (db, app server, etc) as needed, and get them access to other people who can provide other support as needed. In general, I want interns to have projects that can "tell a good story" and help them along their career path. It helps that I had two great intern/co-op experiences and one that was terrible. On the terrible one, I was literally handed a stack of dusty manuals and then abandoned for the summer. No deliverable, no regular meetings with anyone, nothing. I needed the pay to finish school and it took me a two or three week window to realize that I was on my own.