Given the emerging importance of individual biophysical data for understanding software development activities, an internship was organized to provide the students with first hand experience on the collection of such data. The specific goal of the internship was to offer students the possibility to collect, analyse, understand, and draw conclusions from EEG signals. The overall internship spanned about 3 months and involved about 17 students. The results have been very positive in terms of the specific knowledge gained by each student and also of the value of the collected data. In this paper we detail the structure of the internship, the tasks carried out, the challenges faced, and how such challenges have been overcome. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020.