An internship certificate is read by people who were not there — a placement cell approving credit, a recruiter deciding whether ten weeks amounts to anything, a verification firm two years later. It has to carry enough specifics to be checked and enough substance to be worth attaching to an application.
Two readers, one document
The certificate is addressed to whom it may concern, and the sample is posted to the Department of Computer Science at the intern's institute. Both are correct, and the combination is the whole design.
The institution wants it filed against a student record: the department, the dates and the duration, in a form it can check against its own credit requirement. Everyone who reads it afterwards — a recruiter, a background verification firm — wants to know what the intern actually did. Write for the second reader and the first is satisfied automatically. Write only for the first and you have produced proof of attendance.
Duration and mode are facts of their own
Give the date range and the duration as separate statements: 02 June 2026 to 08 August 2026, and ten weeks, full time. A reader could derive the second from the first, but should not have to — and when the two disagree, you find out before the certificate is signed rather than after.
Mode belongs beside them. "On-site, Bengaluru office" and "Remote" are different claims, and part time is a different claim again. Ten weeks at two days a week is entirely defensible written down and indefensible left to be assumed. Institutions that count hours rather than weeks will eventually ask, and by then the attendance record has been archived.
Name the project
The line that gives a certificate any value on a CV is the one saying what the intern worked on. "A demand-forecasting dashboard for the warehouse team" is specific enough that an interviewer can ask a real question about it. "Various tasks assigned from time to time" invites the reader to assume ten weeks of fetching coffee.
Name the mentor with their role for the same reason. It says somebody was accountable for the work, and it gives the intern an honest answer when a future employer asks who they can speak to. A signature from the people function confirms the internship happened; a named mentor confirms it meant something.
Say what the stipend was
State the figure. Institutions record it, some scholarship and fee-waiver processes ask for it, and an intern who needs it later will otherwise come back for a separate letter saying exactly this.
If the internship was unpaid, write "Unpaid" rather than deleting the line. A missing stipend reads as an omission, and a placement officer working through twenty certificates notices the one with a gap where the others carry a number.
A certificate is not a recommendation
Interns ask for both in the same email, and the two documents do different work. A certificate states facts: who, where, when, what, and that conduct was found satisfactory. A recommendation is an opinion addressed to a particular reader, longer and warmer, and signed by the person who supervised the work rather than by HR.
Keep the certificate's praise measured. Diligence, a willingness to learn and a contribution of real value is about as far as a document addressed to whom it may concern should go. If the intern earned more than that, write the recommendation separately and let it be personal.
Then issue it on the last day. The mentor who can describe the project accurately is the one who worked with the intern last week, not the one asked in November about a project that ended in August.