Category: Tutorials

I recently wrote a post about how to hire an intern. Now that you’ve got a willing, able and capable intern, what do you do with them? As their manager you need to provide them with stuff to do, especially at first when they’re still figuring out what their routine will be.

Remember, an intern isn’t just someone you can use to fetch your coffee or pick up your dry cleaning. They’re working for you (probably for free) in order to learn something valuable. It’s up to you as their manager to help them get the most out of their time at your company.

Here are some important questions to ask yourself before your interns first day on the job:

What is it you want them to do?

If you really do want someone to get your coffee and dry cleaning, then perhaps you need a personal assistant instead of an intern. Exploiting your intern is not the best use of your time and makes for a pretty poor experience.  It can also be against the law.

I hire interns to take on some of my responsibilities. While I most certainly could do these things myself, my time is better spent on other, more complicated duties that I wouldn’t trust an intern to do. My intern saves me time while working on meaningful projects.

How much time to you have to dedicate to your intern?

Some people are simply too busy to adequately train and manage an intern. If this is you, then perhaps there is someone else in your office that can help facilitate the intern’s duties. It’s important for an intern to have a “go-to person” where they can direct their questions.

Once you have figured out what you want your intern to accomplish and who will be their point person, take some time to figure out some deadlines. For example, each Thursday my intern, Katelin, knows that she is responsible for creating a blog post highlighting events going on in our area for the coming weekend. This is one of her regular duties. I make sure to give Katelin a list of responsibilities and a list of tasks.

• Responsibilities: These are ongoing projects. Since I am an editor of a monthly publication, I have given Katelin the responsibility of handling a couple of our sections each month. She knows what she needs to accomplish, when it needs to be done, and has a considerable amount of time to reach those goals.
• Tasks: These are short-term projects that I need Katelin to do. It might be creating a blog post, researching a topic for a story I’m working on, taking a photo, delivering magazines to a client—anything that isn’t one of her ongoing responsibilities and needs to have a quick turnaround.

With her list of responsibilities and daily/weekly tasks, Katelin constantly has something to do. Hearing an intern say, “What can I do now?” is my biggest pet peeve. If I have run out of things for them to do I send them to other departments to help out.

The Finer Points of Intern Management

If your intern is good enough, they can find stuff to do around the office when they have downtime – but not all interns have the initiative. Beat them to the punch by having enough stuff for them to do. This might mean that that huge filing project you haven’t gotten around to doing finally gets done. Maybe it means that your company finally gets a Facebook page.

Having a bi-weekly or monthly meeting with your intern is a great way to keep the lines of communication open and create a mentoring relationship. Your intern will probably ask you for a letter of recommendation at the end of the semester, and taking the time to get to know them and evaluate their work will make it easier for you to write one. And who knows? Maybe your intern will be so good they’ll be your next full-time hire…

Remember, your intern is more than just cheap labor. Creating a positive experience for your intern, in turn, creates a positive brand awareness for your company. If your intern is the same age as your target demographic, a great internship experience is like free advertising.

Do-It-Yourself projects are now the new thing to do in your spare time. In this DIY, you will learn how to create a fully functional thirty inch ring light that only costs a fraction of the price of buying one new. So get up off the couch and add a another light to your studio arsenal!

Supplies and Tools

Here is a list of the supplies you are going to need to pick up from your local hardware or home improvement store.

• 1 8×4 sheet of 1/2 inch plywood
• 40 ft lawn and garden extention cord
• 12 keyless light fixtures
• 12 full spectrum 60w coated lightbulbs
• 1 can of flat black high heat spray paint

Total amount spent – $63.00

Here is the list of tools that I used for the job.

• Battery powered drill
• Skill saw or circular saw
• Box cutter knife
• Jigsaw
• Router
• Hole-saw
• Straight edge or long ruler
• Some extra wire or string
• Screw driver
• Wire strippers
• Tape measure
• Sand paper

Step 1

Take your sheet of plywood and cut it in half to make two square sheets.

Step 2

Measure in fifteen inches from a side of the plywood and put a screw half way into the plywood. This is going to be the center of the ring.

Step 3

Wrap some string or wire around the screw, stretch it out to the end of the plywood, wrap it around a permanent marker and draw a circle. Shorten the wire by 6 inches and draw another circle. This will be the cutting lines/guides for your ring.

Step 4

Take a straight edge and mark lines every 30 degrees from edge to edge through the center of the circle. This will mark the spots for your light fixtures so they are evenly spaced.

Step 5

On the lines marked in Step 4, measure 3 inches in from the outer ring line and mark the center for your fixture holes.

Step 6

Take a 3-inch hole-saw, line it up with your center marks and drill out the twelve holes for your fixtures.

Step 7

Take a jigsaw and cut along the two cirlces marked in Step 3.

Check Point

After following the first few steps, your plywood should look something like this. If it doesn’t, leave a comment and I’ll do my best to help you out!

Step 8

Take your plywood and paint it black. Spray paint is best for this, as it saves a great deal of time over brushing it by hand. You’ll the need to wait for it to try before continuing.

Step 9

Position all twelve light fixtures over the holes in the plywood and screw them down. Make sure that the two center screws on the back of each fixture are easily accessable for wiring.

Step 10

Take your extension cord and cut off the female plug. Use your box cutters to cut away about 5ft of the insulation to expose the inner wires. Take your wire cutters and cut out the ground wire from the uninsulated section.

Step 11

Make a mental note that the end of the wire is going to be Point B, and Point A is the part of the wire right after the insulation ends.

Step 12

Starting from Point A, strip three-quarters of an inch of insulation from both black and white wires.

Step 13

Take your black wire and wrap it around the gold screw and tighten to ensure a good connection. Take white wire and wrap it around the silver screw and tighten.

Step 14

Continue counter-clockwise to the next light fixture, repeating Steps 12 and 13. Make sure you give the wire some slack between fixtures so that the connections are not strained.

Step 15

When on the twelfth light fixture, cut off the excess wire, leaving enough to wire the twelfth one.

Check Point

Now that the wiring is taken care of, your ring light should look like this.

Step 16

Repeat Steps 2, 3, 7 and 8 on the second half of the plywood to make the back. The back will be used to cover the wires, will make it look better, and is generally a good precaution to keep your lighting rig safe.

Touching any exposed wire while the rig is connected would be extremely dangerous. Make sure that everything is secured, and safely contained between these two rings before plugging it in!

Step 17

Take your router and route out the middle of your back peice about a quater inch deep and two and a half inches wide.

Step 18

Line up the front ring and back ring. Put two screws in between each fixture an inch from each side to ensure a solid construction.

Step 19

Take your sand paper and sand around the edges of the ring to make it nice and smooth.

Step 20

Screw in all your light bulbs into the light fixtures. I’m using fairly standard bulbs here, but you can experiment with different strengths and colours for all manner of different effects!

Step 21

Plug it in to make sure that your light is working! If everything has gone to plan, you should see your hard work illuminate beautifully.

Conclusion

I hope that this tutorial wasn’t too confusing to follow. This isn’t an incredibly simple DIY project, and you do need some existing knowledge to make it a success. With some trial and error, hopefully you’ll be able to get there yourself!

If you have any questions about the process, or purpose, of a particular step, just drop a comment down below and I’ll be glad to answer your questions!

In today’s quick tip screencast, we’re going to learn a MySQL query trick. You might be already familiar with the SUM() and IF() functions. We will be combining them to come up with some useful queries. This can reduce the number of queries you need to run for fetching certain types of summary data, and also provide a performance improvement.