Who You Calling A Jesse?

With the beginning of a new term some departments on campus might be welcoming their new Co-op student employee to their new web job. They may have been hired to web and ‘other’ stuff or they may just be hired to work on your web site. Over the past few years I have had the pleasure of working with a large number of students and here are some suggestions for both employers of Co-ops and the Co-ops themselves:

1. Understand Co-op students are still at school. This is not to suggest the student can not act professional, quite the opposite as students at UW are serious about their education are conduct themselves in a professional manner, but what I mean is that they may want to take a class or maintain connections with student clubs are organizations. Let them.
2. Projects need to take less than two weeks to complete. You can break larger projects into smaller ones if you have to but its important to have a sense that things are moving ahead and they are doing something useful they can see.
3. When planning projects make a little for them to pick a project. It gives them some time to explore an area they are interested in and might even help you out in the long run.
4. Make sure there is documentation and its accurate and it isn’t created in the last two weeks of employment.
5. Use the tools and programming languages that are common on campus: PHP, mySQL, Dreamweaver, Contribute, XHMTL, CSS. It will make it a lot easier for someone to help you and/or hand the work off to someone else.
6. Plan your web site. Know what you want to do before the coding starts. It will save a lot of time.
7. Have fun.

…and one last thing. If you are looking to hire students for web work and you aren’t building web applications, try not to focus on Math/CS/Engineering as your only source of good web employees. The web is a communication medium, it is about using technology almost more than it is about developing it, give Arts and ES a chance.