How we run remote internships across CET and Pakistan
Overlap hours, written decisions, and why a named mentor matters more than a Slack channel.
A remote engineering internship fails in quiet ways: the student waits twelve hours for a code review, the task was never specified in writing, and the university faculty later asks who actually supervised the student.
We treat timezone overlap as core infrastructure. Core hours are 09:00–13:00 CET (12:00–16:00 PKT). That daily 4-hour window is reserved for pairing, architectural standups, and unblocking reviews: not for redundant status meetings. Outside this window, students in Germany make independent progress against a typed spec, automated CI checks, and comprehensive test suites.
Every intern has a named Internship Lead plus an embedded engineering squad in Karachi. The mentor owns the learning narrative and weekly 1:1s; the squad owns code reviews and merges.
We require a concise architecture decision record (ADR) on every non-trivial pull request. That record becomes the spine of the student’s final Praktikumsbericht.