The Intern Link

So here’s my slightly uncomfortable takeaway:

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.” The Intern

Here’s what I learned:

Here’s a clean, engaging draft for a blog post titled . I’ve written it in a reflective, story-driven style (suitable for a career, leadership, or personal growth blog), but I’ve also included a few alternative directions at the end. The Intern We’ve all seen the movie. The one where a seventy-year-old widower, bored with retirement, shows up as a senior intern at an online fashion startup. Robert De Niro’s character, Ben, doesn’t know Slack from a slingshot. He uses a briefcase. He shows up early. He offers unsolicited—and unexpectedly wise—advice. He just needed someone to tell him, “It’s

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 one where a seventy-year-old widower, bored with

If you think of interns as just “cheap labor” or “future hires,” you’re missing the point. The best interns—regardless of age—don’t just do work. They hold up a mirror. They ask the question everyone else was afraid to ask. They remind us why we started doing this in the first place.

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.