Voice of NTU's guidelines to Internship

With the holidays nearing and internship starting; its an issue of the students wanting to clear their prerequisite criteria, schools wanting their students to be good ambassadors for them, and the firms wanting cheap labour to leverage on, on the pretense of 'Internship'.

And under Ministry of Manpower regulations, interns (In fact all employees) are only required to work 8 hours a day, subjected to a maximum of 44 hours a week.   

That means, about 9am to 6pm on weekdays (with an hour of lunch break) and 4 hours on a saturday. Anything else would qualify as overtime, which entitles you to overtime pay. Which is 150% of your standard rate. Which means you can refuse to stay back!

In my accounting course, i learnt this, that compensation should be tied to the employee's productivity. And employee's productivity is tied to the effort he puts in. However, in the internships we students do, we know that the compensation is fixed. So the only way to get your money worth, (hey you pay peanuts you get monkeys) is to vary your effort level.

Okay. back to the accounting equation, compensation varies with productivity. and productivity varies with effort. So we can say compensation varies with effort. And since compensation is fixed? how much should effort shall we put in?

1) Rate as a tutor: $50 per hour (I was actually teaching jc chinese at this rate few years back so..)
2)  Rate as a freelance copywriter/designer: $20 an hour. (The people i work with in my company)
3) Rate as a admin assistant: $6 an hour.
4) Rate as a MacD server: $4.50 an hour.
5) Rate of an intern: Do your maths, at 44 hours a week for 4 weeks a month.

So with the wage comparison, the way to vary your effort function would be:

1) Lets look at Dibert again. Pick up smoking: (PS you dont light the colour coded end)

2) Short MCQ question -

When doing your internship, what happens if you finish your work on time? (At best, early) You will be rewarded with:
1) The Best Intern Award
2) A pay rise
3) More work

Take your time.

Are you doing an internship this summer? Share with us your bad internship experience, through an email! Voice.of.ntu@gmail.com. all contributions will be kept anonymous.

Do you have any other advice for interns? Let us know through a comment below!

(PS you can bet I'll be taking multiple smoke breaks this summer. do tweet me for a smoke break when you are around the bugis area)