Lighting/Electrics Intern skills

[Sean]

Hello all....

No, we already have an intern selected for this coming season.

I work for a multi-venue LORT B+ company. We have specifically an ELECTRICIAN internship. They spend the season with us doing electrician-type tasks, not design tasks. They also do NOT regularly run shows--that's not the point of having them.

With our recent expansion, both in venue and in staff, I have less time as the department head to interact one-on-one with the intern. This means I have less opportunity to see what each intern needs. I've never had a 'you'll learn/do this by the end of your time here' list, but there really was a natural progression of tasks and concepts so that wasn't needed. We let them explore things that are of interest, within reason.

So, a few questions....

For those of you that have internships, do you have a curriculum? Would you be willing to share it off-list?


For those of you in college-level academic theatre, where do you feel are the weaknesses in your program? Be honest, where do you feel like you 'fall-short' when it comes to your students walking out the door? Which skills/tasks just aren't covered in enough detail for the student to _really_ grasp? There's no way, without a huge amount of staff, gear, and funding for most schools to teach everything. What gaps do you as an educator feel are most in need of being filled?


And finally, for those of you that regularly work with new-to-the-professional-world electricians, what gaps in skills do you most often encounter? Do you have a 'wish-list' of things you'd like every new person walking in the door to know?


Things that are regularly on my not-written-down-until-now list:
basic "do's/don'ts" for working as a freelancer (show up on time, don't ask too many questions, don't be the last one back from break, etc)
knots. Figure-8, clove, bowline, trucker's hitch
explaining how 3 phase power works (ie, where 208v comes from, etc)
how to properly make/break cams
how to tie in cam tails
basic chain motor operation/rigging concepts
basic fall protection rules/work safety rules
loading/unloading of scrollers
"tricks of the trade" with lights....donuts, printer's plate in the gate, ghost-loads
some 'easy' crew leading (intern knows most about task, so s/he takes a couple helpers during a call to finish task)
Dimmer concepts: SCR/SSR, IGBT, Sine wave, etc.
the "shooting down" of as much urban legend as possible. Thus far my favorite: "Camlok connectors were designed for Navy submarines." WTF?!

My board-ops, as their patience, and time/show allows also will explain programming concepts and try to get the intern behind the desks. This part of the internship has become harder to "keep" as the time for a lot of programming tasks has gone down, the work-load has increased...and the inherent stress has also increased.

Some years are MUCH easier than others. Because so much of the learning is from the actual doing, our interns really do only get out what they put into it. It's like pulling teeth sometimes to get people to ask questions when they really should.

Thoughts? Helpful hints? Requests for skill sets to be instilled into the next technician we release back into the wild?

Thanks!

--Sean

[porkchop]

I'm going to hit at the third question you asked. The company I work for has an unfortunately high turn over and a lot of our new hires haven't done this kind of thing before. The things our new hires usually don't have a concept of that would be nice are:

Like you said three phase power, how to tie in (bare copper and cams), when they should and shouldn't tie in themselves, when the lines are potentially dangerous (a hot tie in for instance), and when they are actually dangerous (damaged cables). One thing about three phase power that I wish some of our TENURE electricians understood in phase balancing as well.

Another big one is data, one line to one mover or one dimmer rack is easy, but when you have lots of things that need data (hopefully on different universes) you have to start making decisions on what is clean and easy to fix if something goes wrong, what do you have the cable for, and in the end what will work.

If you have any kind of moving light take it down, have the STUDENT take it completely apart and explain how the various stepper motors and sensors (or lack there of) work. If you have a light that gives error codes demonstrate this. In the end most moving lights operate under similar ideas. If you can fix one kind of light, you can quickly and easily learn how to fix another. But I see so many people come too work on shows that have 100+ moving lights and have no idea what they look like inside.

Off the top of my head those are the big three things that I constantly see. There's always going to be company policy based things (turned around ground neutral cams or not for instance) that any newly hired electrician will have to get used to no matter how long they've been doing it but more people starting with this knowledge would be wonderful.

[derekleffew]

Originally Posted by Sean

...the "shooting down" of as much urban legend as possible. Thus far my favorite: "Camlok connectors were designed for Navy submarines." WTF?!...

I think you need to start a new thread with more of these.