Dojo Internship Program - Dragon-and-Crane-Dojo/learn GitHub Wiki

Dojo Internship Program

Listing

Dragon and Crane Dojo is on the lookout for summer interns age 16 and up! Per California state law, the prime beneficiary of an internship is not the organization, but the intern. The dojo has a diverse backlog of projects that provide an opportunity to develop professional skills, beef up your resume, and gain hands on experience with tools and processes in a rapidly evolving, customer-facing, technology-supported, small business environment.

The projects will integrate your existing knowledge of karate and augment it with knowledge about the arts traditions, evolution, and pedagogy, even as you make meaningful contributions to the dojo’s business systems along the way.

Roles:

Office Admin

The domain of the office admin is everything that takes place in the dojo other than direct instruction. This spans a broad spectrum of domains and skills:

  • design marketing A/B campaigns and sales qualification funnels to attract and onboard new students
  • setup customer relations management (CRM) system and notification templates to ensure regular, efficient, and bespoke communications between the dojo and students
  • configure learning management systems (LMS) and design lesson plans to track and optimize student learning outcomes
  • streamline logistics of recurring and ad-hoc events
  • document business processes for both internal staff and external customer consumption
  • author and present to the dojo community our overall mission and how each initiative furthers those goals
  • explore and cultivate new potential business lines

This role requires a generalist’s grasp of big picture strategy with a specialist’s attention to detail, a CSM’s knack for interfacing with and gauging customer needs an inventor’s willingness to rethink and experiment.

The ideal candidate possesses a hunger to succeed through failure and recognition of the importance of communication skills.

Software Engineer

The software engineer will develop a web frontend from the ground up serving as a portfolio of both their martial arts and technical skills. The results of this project will serve as a blueprint for future student interns to reproduce and expand upon.

The project will use industry standard tools and practices:

  • Github version control (VCS)
  • Docker containerization
  • Test Driven Development (TDD)
  • Agile project management
  • React framework
  • Continuous Integration (CI/CD)
  • Markdown-formatted (MD) wiki documentation

The ideal candidate is self-directed, understands that “throwaway work” is not wasted effort, humble enough to seek outside help when stuck on a problem, and conscientious enough to do so only after first making an honest attempt at reading the documentation.

EDIT: subprojects

  • build raspberry pi
  • accelerometer/motion sensor → speed detector
  • coding problems strategy
  • create website plugin eg 2D carousel
  • create Adobe plugin eg canvas/layer naming
  • tools: Trello, Github, StackOverflow, Hackerrank

Curriculum Developer

At its highest form, karate is not only a physical activity but an intellectual one. The ability to convey knowledge and concepts beyond self-defense through movement is foundational to the dojo’s very existence.

The curriculum developer will help brainstorm, articulate, and document lessons that can be integrated into a regular karate class to convey concepts they will encounter in academic and professional settings. Topics include but not limited to:

  • mathematics, especially geometry
  • physics: mechanics of movement
  • cognitive and behavioral science
  • history, language, and culture of Korean and Japanese
  • small business administration

The ideal candidate both agrees to and can simply explain the following maxim: “learning how to teach teaches you how to learn.”

Graphic Designer

The graphic designer will use the Adobe suite – particularly Illustrator and InDesign – to illustrate karate lessons into static PDF booklets to be printed out for student consumption.

With the ever growing proliferation of Tweets measured in characters and TikTok videos measured in seconds, all delivered wirelessly to mobile electronic devices, this may seem quaintly anachronistic.

Consider that, in an age of “content” that is forgotten as quickly as it is consumed, durable printed material flipped through by hand can have the kind of coveted “stickiness” that UI/UX designers design A/B tests to capture.

This role may be incorporated into other projects, especially the Curriculum Developer.

The ideal candidate for this role has desire to gain experience in visual arts and design, enjoys teaching, and enjoys paring down verbiage to a bare minimum.

Role Analysis Exercise

Have intern/candidate do a deep dive into each of these roles, what they mean, what skills they utilize and strengthen, and how they relate to their career goals.

Procedure

  • in a notebook, draw up a 4-column table with the role name at top of each column
  • in each column, write out all the key words each on a separate line, whether processes ("onboard new students"), tools ("learning management system"), or anything else that jumps out
  • for each of those bullet items, ask the following questions:
    • "how well do I understand what this is/means?"
    • "if I had to do this tomorrow, how clear of a sense of how to go about it do I have?"
    • "in what way/situation would this skill be useful/necessary in my future career?"
    • "what is an example either in my life or in movies/TV I've seen this (or something like it)?"
  • start small: 1-3 items in each column and take a look at it together

Value

  1. parsing job listings is a really important skill, since seemingly small details can have a large impact on whether your expectations are aligned with the actual job duties
  2. general reading comprehension exercise - work-speak can seem abstract or opaque, but is a particularly important form of text
  3. professional development. these are the kinds of terms you will see on job listings on sites such as Glassdoor.com
  4. info processing/option selection skills. drawing up the grid helps deal with information overload, esp when presented with multiple options that need side-by-side comparison. useful any time you're selecting among multiple options simultaneously, esp big purchases or investments, vendors, housing selection, etc