You don't understand what's being articulated in the first sign? I mean, it has a grammatical error, but the meaning seems relatively obvious...

For example, let's say that there are 330 business graduates. And 30 upperclassmen in search of internship opportunities.

If one out of every 11 of those business graduates offered an internship, that would be 330/11 = 30. Which is, oddly enough, the number of upperclassmen mentioned earlier.

Amazing, innit?

That number may be deceptive, though. If they are talking about all business graduates, they may be conveniently ignoring the fact that some will have moved out of the area, and some are not yet established enough to offer internships, and some aren't in business at all at this point.

So they might really need every KSU business grad who meets those requirements, instead of just 1 in every 11.

I'm here!

Well, for certain values of "here", nazwaz.

Wow. It's been nearly 2 months since I've been a regular in chat. I'm sure that Gondhir is in dire need of some stern looks at this point.

Must drop in and remedy that.

... the ratio of current internship-seekers (across the undergraduate student body, post-freshman to post-senior level) to extant internship givers is 1:11.

Sure, ask away, but do you mean undergraduate researchers in general or with respect to the above signs?

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Banazir

I generally meet with undergrads on a weekly basis - usually just a short 10-minute bit of face time, maybe 20 minutes every other week, to collect their work. With some of my active programmers, I talk to them on the phone or IM an hour or so at a time. I also have grad students who guide undergrads along, answer certain questions, and help me to keep projects on track.

I generally lay out:

1. a line of research and the overall goal, rationale, technical objectives, and evaluation measures
2. constraints as far as desired time frame, platform, resources, look-and-feel guidelines
3. target publications and sample work (code, past publications, results)

and then let them set to it. I am capable of micromanaging to a minute level, but I have had much greater success when I let students have free rein rise to the occasion.

My best students are exceedingly self-sufficient. When zengeneral was an undergrad, he was phenomenally productive. weninger is very productive, too. Both are able to synthesize concepts and come up with (sometimes very intricate) tasks.

A digression: If I were to critique my own performance as a manager, it's that I tend to leave things very open-ended and laissez-faire these days. I've become completely abhorrent of micromanagement because I've seen how much it can stifle creativity. I had the good fortune of having undergrad profs (Salzberg, Kasif, Zwarico, Smith) who were very protective of our opportunities for personal and professional development. That is to say, they let us have a tremendous amount of freedom in the lab, with our time, etc. With that freedom came individual responsibilities. Some of the students languished; others "took to it like a fish to water" and "worked harder than grads" (this is what two of my profs said about me). Of course, they didn't always have to pay us, but looking back, my best work was done as a volunteer anyway.

Looking back, I can't stress enough how precious the liberty was and how much it facilitated rather than impeded our progress. We never had to answer to funding agencies, systems administrators, or even graduate students and postdocs for our work. In particular, I was allowed to rig my own broadband connections, configure servers any way we needed to, install free or site-licensed software (even throughout the undergrad computing lab) without having to ask permission in most cases.

I'd like to add a personal "thank you" to Dr. Mark Orletsky, the head sysadmin of JHU-CS in those days. Mark, I'll never forget your words:

Throughput at all costs.

Anyhow, I hope I answered your question - if not, can you tell me more about your situation and any concerns/dissatisfaction you have?

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Banazir