TL;DR:
Our team organises internships each year, welcoming fresh energy, and the chance to give back to the community by mentoring young developers. Previous feedback helped us in building a great program, along with the insight from this year’s mentors with diverse experience and knowledge. We consider this year’s program a success, highlighted by the production-ready Monster Therapy Analytics project, great memories, and the hiring of five out of eight interns.
The mentors’ retrospective reveals satisfaction in sharing knowledge and learning from the interns. Each mentor ended the internship with their passion for mentorship fueled, and thankfulness for their personal and professional growth. We are already looking forward to an even better internship experience in 2025.
Nurturing Future Talent
At evozon, we eagerly (async) await internships. We love the energy interns bring into our company, and seeing young students so keen on learning. Their enthusiasm is contagious and generates nostalgia for when we were young and energetic, and when our knees, backs, and eyesight were strong. All jokes aside, one of our core values is giving back to the community by mentoring young developers, and offering internships brings us a great sense of fulfilment. We love summertime because it means interacting with new talent, helping them learn, and learning from them!
Our internship process is continuously evolving, and this year’s internship is the result of the work and effort done by previous mentors, feedback from the interns during past years, and the magic that happened inside this year’s team. Speaking about this year’s mentorship team we followed a recipe that has worked for us in the past. Our team included members who have been involved in previous internships, and colleagues with various levels of experience (providing both seniority and relatedness to the internship team)!
With these ingredients, we cooked the 2024 internship, but let’s look more closely at what we call successes and our improvement plans.
What went right
A Project That Matters
The biggest plus from the perspective of both interns and mentors was the internship project. Most programs involve working on a dummy/sandbox project that never sees the light of day. They are amazing for providing a risk-free learning opportunity, but also lack clear requirements, fail to mimic a real environment, and don’t satisfy the team’s need for measurable results. Because we wanted to have a fail-safe space, while also keeping it real, we worked on a platform for analytics for our close friends, a game development team. The project the Game Dev Team is currently working on, Monster Therapy, is in an advanced stage, getting ready to roll out a large number of first-time play-testers. To learn as much as possible from that experience, the team needed an analytics platform that was quick to integrate, is very customizable, and comes at a low cost. This made implementing it with the interns an opportunity for both teams to benefit from this project: the game dev team gets to externalise the cost and effort, and the internship team gets to work with real stakeholders. Having the application designed for a real client, and getting their feedback made this year’s internship feel more authentic.
The Plan! – A Structure for Learning
The interns appreciated our onboarding process and the internship’s structure; this feedback is aligned with our perception. What did they value? Well, for one, the clear overview and content of the whole six weeks we spent together from the very first day.
Our program included:
- Presentations and Workshops focused on both technical (e.g., databases, Git, React, unit testing, Figma basics) and soft skills (e.g., communication, time management) as well as sessions on company culture, and Agile methodology.
- Team Building Activities designed to help the team move through the five stages of team formation and build trust and collaboration. These activities featured games and exercises prepared by our in-house training team, as well as sessions facilitated by the mentorship team to establish expectations, communication standards, and working style.
- One-to-Ones (1:1s) organized bi-weekly, to check in with the interns, to offer personalized feedback, to help the members’ development, and to offer them support. They complemented the daily pair programming sessions and code reviews.
- Scrum Ceremonies nurtured communication and teamwork. Stand-ups, Planning, Retrospectives and ad-hoc alignment discussions, in pairs or larger groups helped build the team’s agility.
- Project Introduction Sessions offered an overview of project goals, roles, and user perspectives. These sessions were led by mentors and the Business Analyst. Additional involvement from our end clients (the game development team) helped communicate the project’s needs. One of the activities featured a demo presented by the game development team, showcasing the game that will benefit from the project. This was especially appreciated by the gamers among the interns and offered them insight into the game design process.
In previous years, we split teams into Front-End and Back-End roles, but we decided to spice things up this year. All eight interns worked as Full-Stack developers, allowing them to see the implementation from end to end—a setup they highly appreciated, as it gave them a complete view of the development process.
Dream Team – Mentors
Another highlight this year was the mentoring team—we had great fun, and it showed! The mentorship team included individuals in roles such as Back-End Developers, Front-End Developers, Project Manager, Business Analyst, Scrum Master, and Product Owner, with the additional involvement of a UI/UX Specialist. Support was also provided by the HR team, particularly the in-house Training Team, our dedicated HR Specialist, and, last but not least, the Department Manager. This resulted in exposure to a variety of roles and expectations for our interns, helping them naturally transition into commercial projects in the future.
We started forming the mentorship team ahead of time, bringing in mentors from previous programs, to ensure continuity and experience, while also introducing new mentors with fresh perspectives. This mix also allowed newer mentors to ‘learn by teaching’. Starting early gave us insights that informed our decisions going forward. Initially, we planned to have three developers on the team, but we soon realised that adding an extra developer would better meet the project’s needs. Therefore, we ended up with four mentors, each of whom coincidentally started as an intern! Ale, Cosmin, Ovi, and Răzvi are former interns from 2016, 2019, and 2023.
The highly engaged mentoring team fostered a welcoming and supportive environment, creating an intern-focused program that prioritised learning and adaptability. Mentors were approachable and available, ensuring interns felt supported throughout the experience. Tasks were assigned based on intern strengths and motivation, making the work both relevant and engaging. The informal, friendly setting encouraged open communication, helping interns feel comfortable sharing their thoughts and questions. This approach not only made learning more effective but also helped build trust, motivation, and a strong foundation for active learning.
A Thoughtful Selection Process
The interns’ selection process was one of the first steps in making this internship a success. This year’s and previous years’ mentors gathered and decided on qualities we should look for in a candidate. Next, a team of volunteers from across the department gathered to help with holding interviews. We organised our yearly “How to Interview” workshop to better prepare for all this (thanks to our awesome training team).
Candidates started our selection process with a written test, then based on the results, we scheduled interviews with our colleagues. We want the interview also to be a learning opportunity for the candidate, so we provide feedback on the spot. Moving forward, we had debriefing meetings to put our thoughts together. We complemented the on-the-spot feedback with more in-depth feedback, and then presented it to the candidate, focusing on positives, negatives, and improvements.
We designed the process of selection in multiple steps to select the people who show both great technical potential and best fit for our culture. This also helps us with keeping the amount of interviews manageable and making sure to provide feedback to applicants in a timely manner. It helped us select our team of eight interns out of more than 600 candidates.
Feedback: The Core of Our Mentorship Philosophy
The continuous feedback process is the cornerstone of our approach, due to our commitment to growth, collaboration, and technical excellence. As previously mentioned, we give feedback through a variety of interactions, and this year was no different than the years before.
One-to-ones continued to be a key component because we value human interactions and delivering feedback face-to-face. These sessions allowed us to have meaningful conversations, encourage dialogue, and provided room for the receiver’s thoughts and input. We strongly believe that feedback should be a two-way conversation.
Pull requests were another essential feedback channel, providing highly specific feedback and actionable insights. They were especially valuable for making feedback more tangible for junior developers. We recognize we may have gone overboard sometimes, but we addressed this by telling interns that the number of comments didn’t reflect their work. Instead, the countless comments were meant to help improve their strengths.
Mob programming sessions were another highlight of our approach. These sessions fostered debates and brainstorming, enabling us to solve challenges as a team. They weren’t just productive – they were also fun and left us with great memories of working as a team.
By using these different ways to give feedback, we continuously improved how we worked, while also strengthening team relations. Every interaction contributed to moving closer to our goals: learning, growing, and having fun!
Plans for Improvement
First Week Experience
The mentoring team usually puts a lot of pressure on themselves to get the first day of the internship perfect. First impressions matter, right? This year we organised a “meet the team” event, which could use some improvements. We decided to have a welcome coffee together, hold a kick-off meeting with Cătă (.NET department’s manager), meet colleagues from the department, and chat about their jobs. Then move to the regular onboarding that each employee has, discuss the structure of the internship, and then have some activities to help us with the forming stage of our team.
The interns’ feedback highlighted that meeting the rest of our colleagues on other days would be more comfortable. Next time we will try to arrange the ”meet the department” moments later into the first week’s plan. Moving on, interns said that the order of activities during that first day is a bit off – saying we should have started with the team-building activities. This one’s an easy fix. We thought having team-building activities first might be a bit awkward, but the first days can be like that. Why not embrace it in 2025? Good luck, future interns!
Theory vs Reality – Less Talk, More Walk during the 1st Week of the evozon Internship
Another popular opinion among this year’s internship team was that we should have introduced more hands-on training during the first week. So far, we used this week for training sessions and discussions, laying down the theoretical groundwork and building the skills needed for the internship project. We are used to interns saying they want to start work early on. Have we mentioned that they are eager?
Over the years, we’ve already reduced our trainings from two weeks to just over one week. Next year, we’re considering a new approach: incorporating project deliverables into the first week. Future interns, don’t worry! We’ll start small, introducing manageable tasks alongside training. We hope this will give interns the chance to focus their enthusiasm on specific and measurable objectives, allowing them to immediately apply what they’re learning.
Going Live
Going live with the application is the checkbox that we rarely get to tick during internships. Having moved closer to this target this year, we plan on achieving it with next year’s project to complete the full development life cycle! Usually, we stick to prototypes, starting with an app idea that either the interns or mentors propose (last year we worked on an app for meal planning delivery). But this year, we got closer than before—delivering most MVP features and nearly reaching a launch-ready stage. Next year, we’re aiming to finally cross that off our list and have the interns go through the process of a complete release, giving them this experience.
We believe that exposing interns to every stage of development—from planning the release and doing final tests to seeing the app deployed in the real world—will make their experience more satisfying. It’s also an opportunity for them to learn how to prioritize features and maintain quality standards under real deadlines while understanding the ins and outs of delivering a product to clients. Our goal for the internship is to provide interns with an experience that mimics a real project as closely as possible, with the added safety net. We might not always have the right real project at the right time for the internship, but it’s certainly something we’ll be looking closely at.
Work Balance
Another promise we make to ourselves is to have a better workload for mentors next year. This year was a little tight in terms of allocation for our mentors, as most of them were only able to mentor part-time. We also had just one Front-End developer mentoring a team of eight Full-Stack developers, with a UI that turned out to be more complex than expected. Our next internship resolution regarding this is to have a mentor allocation in better accordance with the project and team’s requirements.
A Missing Piece: Dedicated Testers
We did a great job of involving multiple roles in this year’s team, but we missed having dedicated testers—a role we included in previous years with great success. Due to other priorities within the testing department, we couldn’t allocate testers this time, so testing tasks were handled by the game dev team, BA, PM, PO, interns, and mentors. While we managed to do the necessary testing, having testers’ keen eye for detail and suggestions for improvement would have made our application better. We hope to integrate testing roles in our future internships to bring back this valuable perspective and to expose young developers to testers and their mindsets.
Our final thoughts on the .NET Internship 2024 in evozon
image generated with MidJourney, and made prettier by Răzvan Vîtca
We had an incredible summer with our interns, and we are thrilled that Monster Therapy Analytics will soon be live! We are not only left with a very nicely implemented solution but also with plenty of great memories, photos, lessons learned, and memes that capture the fantastic team we built during the summer of 2024.
We’re especially excited that five of our eight interns are now starting their careers with us at evozon. It’s a privilege to continue the journey we began together!
We can’t wait to welcome the 2025 internship team! Preparations are underway to make next year’s experience even better & we are already thinking of the amazing summer ahead!
This article was written by: Alexandra Crișan, Cosmin Grigoriu, Ovidiu Moldovan, Alexandra Onețiu , Răzvan Vîtca
