We decided to test an internship programme at Mandalorian and we found someone that we really wanted to take on as an intern, but I felt that there were two thi

We decided to test an internship programme at Mandalorian and we found someone that we really wanted to take on as an intern, but I felt that there were two things we needed to do: 1. Pay them a graduate starting salary for the duration of their internship. 2. Make sure we had the time to invest in helping them grow before going back to university rather than just giving them shit jobs or using them as cheap labour. Unfortunately number 2 was derailed by the fact that we took a full time graduate on and felt that this combined with illness meant we couldn't guarantee the mentoring that we wanted to provide. We felt that we couldn't do right by the intern we wanted, so we postponed the programme. We set up a hack week for next month in order for our geographically disparate team to get some time together and some proper training. In addition to bringing the team we invited both the intern we had to cancel and the student we wanted to intern with us for next year (as we found him this year but he was a year early). Our plan is to spend a week breaking stuff and training each other up on core pentesting areas. The students get to come along and join in on that as well as take part in ad-hoc hacking sessions. Both students took us up on it and we're covering their costs. Our not quite intern will probably be offered a job around graduation time, the other lad will almost certainly be our paid intern next year. There's a right way and a wrong way to do internships. If you can't do it the right way I believe you shouldn't do it at all. By all means offer them opportunities if they're genuine, but don't dress them up as internships. Just be straight with them. The students attending hack week will go back to Abertay Uni to do their ethical hacking degree projects having spent the week living with a pentest team and hacking all the things, something none of the other students will have done. While they haven't been paid they won't pay a penny for the week. I will reluctantly let them chip in for beer if they insist, but everything else is on us. It just wouldn't be right any other way.