Bittersweet moment today, the interns last day was today, the improvements they made over the last 4 months, putting up with my “Gordon Ramsey” style attitude... definitely goes down in the books as one of best groups of freshman interns. They all truly thanked me for what they learned I sat them down and did a code review with them... but fooled them and showed them code they wrote 4 months ago.. they totally forgot about.. and couldn’t believe it was their own code.. that’s the level professionalism and improvement they made writing embedded software in 4 months.. they can’t wait to for next summer, neither can I.
Even had some of the electrical interns asking our department manager if they could switch to more software focused during their next rotation. Just so they can be under me.
I may be hard and a dick at time... but they learn! And it says a lot when you have college students impacted enough and see other students benefit so much that the “outsiders” wanna switch majors or focuses.!

Can I join next summer too?

thank you, yeah,they always have the opportunity to improve. Lol yes lots of times, “wtf is this shit” ... “redo it” ... “stop stop stop ABORT!! WTF!!! Who said push to fucken master!!”... “did you read the fucken datasheet?? That’s not how that works”..... “STOP FUCKEN ASSUMING SHIT” .... “Are you even reading wtf your typing or just copy paste, compile run... because there’s no way you are actually reading this shit when there isn’t any consistent indentation.”

They eventually get comfortable enough and bond grows between them and I ... where they flip out on me, and call me out on mistakes I make, so it becomes a 2 way street which really creates some very good conversations. It may seem hostile from the outside, but the reality is everyone is just being “blunt” and straightforward... some yelling yes but that’s just passion lol. I also find them talking to each other that way as well, so it’s self policing haha.

But besides that stuff one of the keys to my philosophy of how I mentor my interns is I rarely flat out give them the answer, when they are struggling I still will stop and trying to push them in the correct direction, but I do it the way of asking questions. Making them have to think about why this or that method would be correct. Rather than is this correct? Also will sometimes have to halt everything break out the white boards, and step on a “soapbox” do a quick theory lesson. As they haven’t got that far in class or the concept is completely new to them.