Best Practices for Employers With Interns

Best Practices for Employers With InternsBest Practices for Employers With InternsWorking with an in eigener sache is both a privilege and a responsibility for an employer. Interns can be a boon to your business and give you the extra pair of hands, current educational thinking, and enthusiasm and stab und sttze your business needs. An employer can gain assistance and support at a time when your company is growing, but notlage yet ready to add full or part-time regular staff. You can supplement full-time staff and accomplish projects and assignments that you might not otherwise have had the resources to pursue. You can use an interns fresh knowledge of your field to look at possibilities for expanding and improving your offerings for customers. An intern brings a fresh perspective, the vibrancy of a young person, or even an older person, who is learning about or starting out in their field of dreams. An intern can bring needed diversity to an employer. Interns are accustomed to learn ing, writing, researching, and producing work on a schedule. An employer and your employees can gain a lot from the contributions of an intern if you manage the internship effectively. How Employers Can Magnify the Intern Experience In turn, an employer owes interns certain monetary and experiential factors. Interns should receive payment for services The most frequent disagreement around utilizing interns revolves around whether an employer needs to pay interns. In my part of the country, interns make $10 to $12 an hour the best-paid interns make around $20. Regardless of the experience, an employer is providing for an intern, the intern deserves payment for services rendered.This is a small price to pay to attract the best and brightest students as interns or the young people who may not have deep pockets supporting them in college. Paying interns gives you the opportunity to attract young people whom you may eventually hire, regardless of their financial situation.Paying int erns ensures diversity, as any student can apply for the paid internship. Additionally, paying interns allows the interns to work more hours in your business, rather than holding down a part-time job or two. Why not enable the interns to spend their time learning and contributing to your business? Employers should select interns as you would an employee. Use a systematic hiring process to hire your interns. The interns will appreciate the experience you provide when they hit the real world job market. Your employees will select the intern from a variety of candidates and experience more ownership and commitment to the interns experience, as a result. Employers with a tried and true hiring process will attract and hire their best candidate interns.Interns deserve a well-rounded intern experience No, interns are not working in your business to make copies, file paperwork, and sit at your reception desk greeting visitors and answering phones. Can this schrift of task be part of an inte rnship? Absolutely. In business, employees help out with whatever the business needs, but you are short-changing the interns and your business - if this encompasses the experience you provide for or the services you utilize from your interns. Interns need a developmental plan. Interns deserve a true introduction to your business that gives them experience in a number of areas related to their interests and potential degree. Employers should require departments to produce a written developmental plan for the interns experience before a department is allowed to hire an intern. Similar to a job description, the plan lays out a developmental path with specific outcomes. The best internship plans also provide an onboarding component so that interns quickly assimilate within your company.This gives the interns you really want, and may potentially hire, a good picture of what their experience will encompass in your organization. This is a competitive advantage if you are in a market in wh ich employers compete for the most desirable interns. The written plan also provides a guide path for how your department will utilize the intern. The written plan lays out the responsibilities of the employer to provide developmental opportunities for the interns including meetings to attend, projects to work on, time spent with various staff members, and job tasks to learn. A specific boss or ratgeber who is committed to the interns learning is essential. An internship is an opportunity to develop that first, and possibly a career-long relationship, with an individual, or mentor, who cares about and is committed to an interns success. Regular meetings, goals, and guidance are critical in this relationship. Monitoring progress, encouraging the interns growth, and ensuring that the employer is benefitting from the interns time and contribution are components of the mentors job. Assisting the intern to follow the developmental plan is a critical component, too. Include the intern in regular organization events. You want your interns to experience the totality of working for your organization. Holiday parties, community, and professional meetings, TGIF meet-ups at your local tavern, and departmental lunches make the internship experience real. Plus, they add to your potential to attract the best interns to your company after graduation. The interns have had the opportunity to experience your companys extended culture and events for employees. This helps both the intern and the employer assess cultural fit and the potential success of the intern as an employee. Hire the desirable interns for serial internships. If an intern has worked out well in your company, fits your culture, works well with your employees, and offers skills and experience you need, why not offer a return engagement? I have known interns who worked for the same company from high school through college graduation and then, accepted a job offer.Yes, its fine if the intern wants to experience dif ferent internships in different company settings. Encourage your interns to explore other possibilities. But, it is not your responsibility, as the employer, to decree that the interns must work elsewhere for the experience. The decision to work at multiple internships is up to the intern and his or her program counselors not the employer. Make your offer the intern will decide. Hire your best interns. Nothing is more important to an intern who has come to love and value your company, and who is valued and appreciated by you, than to join your company, as a regular employee, upon graduation. Better to hire the person that you know than a stranger whose trial period is on your dime in your job. Note that, in particularly sought after majors and skill sets, interns are accepting job offers as early as fall for a job that starts after their spring graduation. Be prepared to act before you lose your best prospects.

Liquid Biopsy Matches Medicine to the Cancer

Liquid Biopsy Matches Medicine to the Cancer Liquid Biopsy Matches Medicine to the Cancer Liquid Biopsy Matches Medicine to the CancerWhile Mayo Clinic physicians have about 30 different drugs available to them to slow prostate cancers progression, matching patient to therapy is far from a one-size-fits-all solution. But Mayo physicians hope that will soon change.Right now, doctors determine the medication that will work the best against a particular patients prostate cancer, administer the drug, and continue to test to landsee if its working. Even when a therapy works, ongoing tests are still needed to ensure tumors havent mutated and to make the medicine ineffective.Clinicians wanted an easy test patients take every day, with min pain, and get quick results. Based on the biomarkers tumors shed in the blood, patients could tell if their current medical regime was working, if they needed to try another medication and, if so, which one would work best against their particular prostate cancer biomarkers.So Mayo researchers are collaborating on research that would use biomarkers shed in blood along with nanotechnology to characterize tumors and monitor how they grow.In response, researchers are developing noninvasive genomic liquid biopsies.The patient would use a finger stick to collect a drop of blood into a cartridge that would be mailed to the laboratory, says Brian Cunningham, professor of electrical and computer engineering, bioengineering at the University of Illinois.Assistant Professor Andrew Smith, left, and post-doctoral student Sung Jun Lim at work on cancer-detection technology. Image University of IllinoisThe schools Macro and Nanotechnology Laboratory, which Cunningham directs, and its Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology are collaborating with the Mayo Clinic on the project.Perhaps the greatest advantage is that monitoring could be done daily via a simple blood test that could be done at health clinics or diagnostics labs or even at home, Cu nningham says.Doctors usually take MRIs or other imaging tests several months after a drug therapy has started, to see if tumors or growing or shrinking in response.Why wait six months after patients start a drug to take an MRI image to measure tumors, when you could find out if a drug is working so much sooner? Cunningham says.Doctors would like to draw a sample from the patient every day when they start undergoing chemo to watch biomarker levels and see how they change from one day to the next, he adds. If the treatment is being successful, theyll see biomarker levels go down.Testing could be done inexpensively on a desktop-sized instrument that might cost several thousand dollars, he adds. The equipment would be used to look for biomarker molecules known as micro and messenger RNA that tumors shed in the blood of cancer patients. Scientists have only recently been able to test for RNA in the blood, and the accuracy has been poor, Cunningham says.The University of Illinois techniq ue improves that accuracy with nanoparticles, he adds.There may be only 500 to 1,000 of these molecules present in a drop of blood, so being able to identify them requires ultra-sensitive detection approaches, Cunningham says.If we have 30 different messenger RNA sequences were looking to detect, we can see the molecules weve collected and count and differentiate them all within a single test, he adds.But how to identify those molecules?Another university researcher, Andrew Smith, is at work on methods to call out the molecules by binding them with the surfaces of nanoparticles, specifically semiconductor quantum dots that are extremely bright and thus highlight the messenger RNA. A photonic crystal attached to the dot amplifies the RNA signal. Smith is assistant professor of bioengineering at the universitys Micro and Nanotechnology Lab.With the dots, we can see the molecules we collect, he says. The nanoparticles used are so bright they act as tiny little flashlights.After the pat ients messenger RNA is separated from other components of their blood sample, technicians use an enzymatic method to place biotin on that messenger RNA. The quantum dot is attached to the biotin. Then images are taken.If you look in a microscope you can literally see individual molecules, Cunningham says. You see them on a cell phone camera if you have the microscope lens attached.The nanoparticle-tagged molecules would be counted and separated via signal-to-noise ratio, which compares the level of a desired signalfrom the semiconductorto the level of background noise.The number of amount of a particular sequence within the sample would let doctors know whether tumors are sloughing off more materiali.e. growingor lessshrinking. They can then choose to maintain the current medical regime or choose another one.Currently the liquid biopsy method is under trial at the Mayo Clinic. At the same time, the researchers are creating a simple microfluidics device that would allow the method to be used for quick, accurate diagnosis.The device could be available to physicians within five years, depending on FDA trials and tests, he says.Jean Thilmany is an independent writer For Further Discussion With the dots, we can see the molecules we collect, he says. The nanoparticles used are so bright they act as tiny little flashlights.Prof. Andrew Smith, University of Illinois

VLF insights from the Twitter CEO

VLF insights from the Twitter CEOVLF insights from the Twitter CEOThis week, Umair Haque interviewed Twitter CEO Evan Williams at the keynote at this years SXSW Interactive Conference. By many accounts, the interview bombed. But as Haque gently suggests the exchange contained some interesting observations on building a 21st Century businessobservations that resonate with many of themes of the recent mhvt discussion Value Tweet on the emerging virtual law firm model.Here are some excerpts of Haques takeaways which may be relevant to lawyers and new model law firmsOpenness as a survival strategy. New ideas, new concepts, new applications all flow to open organizations. Thats a great way to express the point that for next-gen organizations, openness is now table stakes fail at it, and youre not even in the game. Organizing for experimentation. Though many organizations want to experiment, they cant because theyre not built to Twitter organizes for experimentation, by creating modular teams that rapidly iterate to solve tough problems. Thats what 21st century organizations look like networks, not pyramids. Win/wins. Another theme of our conversation welches focusing on win/wins a term thats become cheapened to the point of jargon, but try looking at it anew Twitter cuts deals with partners only when they think everyone wins including end-users. Par for the course? Think again. Thats pretty radical. Wall St, Detroit, Big Food, Big Software and HMOs are just a few for whom win/wins have mattered little, if at all. Its a simple, powerful way to frame next-gen strategy in a nutshell.On that last point, I think we can safely add BigLaw to the list. It seems to me that the (non-cheapened) concept of win/win is a natural complement to the mhvt theme of results, e.g., ShatterboxVox The issue for client is not VLF vs. trad firm, it is how do I get the results looking for w/ the resources I have? -posted by brian