Student orientation and the hour log

Students join with a different dashboard. You do not see a merchant’s projects, purchases, and store notes first. You see orientation, then Hours. That is deliberate. A Vancouver studio that invoices in CAD and ships English and French cannot treat a student login as a junior merchant account. You are here to learn the week, the tools, and how to write time another person can read. Pick the student role before you connect a wallet or finish email registration. Existing wallets keep the role they already have. If you connected as a merchant by mistake, write admin@sycgeeks.ca. Do not log salon sales on a student hour.

Wallet login is a signed message, not a password. Email login is the other door. Both land in the student view if the role is student. If the nonce route returns empty, the studio database is unreachable — try email, or call +1 (672) 200-7924 on a weekday if you cannot get in and a deadline is today. A blank error is not your fault and not a reason to invent hours in a spreadsheet. Wait until the log can save. Forged hours help nobody.

You can book a Square appointment with no account if a mentor hour was offered. Pacific time, Vancouver. Bring questions that orientation did not cover. Do not book a slot to skip the steps. Orientation is required before hours will save. Booking does not unlock the log. Writing a long email does not unlock the log. Completing the steps does. That rule is how we know you saw the week, the tools, and the way we write time.

Work through the studio steps first: how a week looks on Pacific time, which tools we use, and how to write hours another person can read. A week here is not a campus timetable. Discovery, build, review, and launch sit on a merchant project. Your time sits on the hour log. If you will touch a live cart — Square, Stripe, PayPal, Apple Pay, Interac e-Transfer, optional ETH — orientation will say who may touch it. Students do not “just quickly” refund a CAD order because a demo felt safe. Money has a named owner.

Orientation also covers the three doors. Call the weekday line if you cannot get in or if production you were asked to watch is down. Write admin@sycgeeks.ca if the question can wait for a sentence. Book if a mentor wants to speak. Do not call to ask whether 0.25 hours is allowed. It is. Do not call to ask if stock people photos are acceptable. They are not. Do not call to negotiate care prices for a merchant; those numbers are public — $450 CAD a month or $4,500 CAD a year — and they are not your invoice.

You will see how English and French work on a Canadian site. Bilingual work is not a toggle. Button widths change. Receipts must be correct. A checkout that fails in French is a product bug. If your French is stronger than your English, say so; we will assign review that matches. If you only have one language, do not machine-translate a legal page and log it as “localization.” We refuse that on client work. Orientation says so before you can save a line that claims you shipped both languages.

PIPEDA and WCAG are not elective modules. Collect only what a form will use. Contrast, labels, keyboard paths, and real alt text are launch work. If you are asked to add an analytics script “because the template had one,” you will say no and write the reason. If you are asked to drop a chatbot without a privacy sentence, you will say no. Orientation exists so those refusals are muscle, not a surprise in week three. Finish the steps. Then the log will save.

After the steps are complete, open Hours. Enter the date, the time you spent (0.25 to 24), and a general description — what you built, reviewed, or unblocked. “Reviewed French receipt on the Montreal retailer checkout; HST line still missing for Ontario” is a description. “Worked on stuff” will be sent back. “Misc” will be sent back. “Learning” without a noun will be sent back. The next person should know what moved. They should not need to ping you on a Saturday.

Keep descriptions short and factual. Name the surface: homepage, booking path, dashboard note, privacy page. Name the language if the work was language work. Name the processor if you tested a rail. Name the city if the bug is local — “Burnaby salon book button still shows 2019 walk-in hours” is better than “fixed UI.” Do not write a novel. Do not write a vibe. Do not paste client personal information into the description. The log is capacity, not a CRM.

Date is the day the work happened, in Pacific time. If you worked a Toronto evening that was still afternoon here, use the Pacific date the studio will recognize. Do not split a two-hour task across three creative dates to make a week look even. Do not log 24 hours unless you were actually in the chair for 24 hours — that field exists for rare live events, not for ambition. 0.25 is fifteen minutes. If the task was five minutes, wait until you have a quarter hour of related work, or write that you unblocked a five-minute item and spent the rest on the named review.

If you are stuck, write that you are stuck and book time. “Blocked on Square test account; cannot place a CAD order; booked Thursday mentor slot” is a good line. Sitting on a ticket for three days and then logging eight hours of “investigating” is not. This log is how the studio understands capacity. It is not a timesheet to game. Inflated hours make us staff the next week wrong. Missing hours make us think a Burnaby launch is uncovered. Either lie costs a merchant. We will send the line back if it is empty of facts.

You may write notes a merchant can read if you are asked to sit on a project. Use their dashboard language: decisions, not chat. You may test a path on a staging URL. You may prepare illustration instead of stock people photos. You may check GST versus HST on a receipt if that is the assigned task. You may not invent a price. You may not publish a live change without the named approver. You may not add a payment rail we did not quote. You may not “improve” French with a machine and call it done.

You will refuse a request to hide a disclaimer in six-point type. You will refuse a second inventory next to Square POS because a theme looked cleaner. You will refuse crypto as the only way a salon takes money. You will refuse to collect a phone number “just in case.” You will refuse to skip alt text because a launch is Friday. If a merchant pushes, write the refusal in the hour description and tell a studio lead. The log is also how we see pressure. A student who silently ships a bad cart is not being helpful.

Care work — the reserved studio hour, the watch on jobs that move money — is assigned, not assumed. If you are asked to spend the care hour, log it as care work and name the change. Post-launch add-ons at about 25 percent off are merchant purchases, not student discounts. Do not tell a retailer you can “just add a collection this afternoon” because you have time in the log. That is a quote in CAD on the same project. Your unused hours are not a coupon.

The studio clock is Pacific. A Montreal retailer who answers at 9 a.m. Eastern is 6 a.m. here. Do not book yourself into that unless a lead asked you to. Do not log a late night because the merchant is on Atlantic time and you felt polite. Overlap is a constraint, not a personality test. If your class schedule only allows evenings, say so in orientation notes so we do not put you on a morning launch. Honesty about the clock is part of capacity.

Stop when the assigned task is done or blocked. Do not invent extra polish on a launched page to fill a four-hour gap. Extra polish that changes what the merchant bought is unpaid scope. Extra polish that breaks French spacing is a defect you will have to log again tomorrow. If you have time left, ask for the next named task or write that you are available. Empty heroics do not read as initiative here. They read as risk.

If you are sick or in an exam week, write before the day starts. We would rather a honest zero than eight hours of fog. The log is not a moral score. It is a map of who can watch a processor on Friday. A Burnaby long weekend is when that map matters. Ghosting the log and then appearing on Monday with twelve hours of backfill will be sent back. Log the day you worked. Write the day you could not.

When your work touches a merchant project, the merchant still owns status, progress, and notes. You may be asked to draft a note. You do not change launched to paused because you felt nervous. You do not open a purchase. You do not apply a care discount. You do not move a Square appointment. If the merchant’s cart is down and you are the person who saw it, you call the weekday line and write the URL. Then you log “reported dead Square checkout on Montreal retailer; called studio.” That is the job. Heroic silent fixing is how receipts go missing.

Workflows show the current studio step. Read them before you start. If the step is bilingual review, do not redesign the homepage. If the step is intake, do not write production code. If the step is launched, defects are care; new collections are add-ons. Your hour description should name the step you were in. “Active / build: wired Interac instructions on CAD invoice page” is readable. “Various frontend” is not. Matching the workflow is how a student hour and a merchant file stay one story.

Never paste a merchant password into Hours. Never paste a customer name. Never paste a card. If you need a secret to do the work, ask a lead for the proper vault, then write “used staging Square login” with no value. PIPEDA does not pause for internships. WCAG does not pause for internships. Official languages do not pause for internships. The hour log should prove you understood that, one factual line at a time.

A keepable week looks like this. You know the Pacific hours you can work. You have a named task or you have written that you are waiting. You log the same day, not the following Friday in a batch. You use the three doors correctly. You do not invent scope. You do not decorate a live page with stock faces. You leave a description a merchant, a lead, or a future you can read in February. That is the whole point of the log. Capacity you can trust.

If the week goes wrong — you cannot get in, the log rejects a save, a live path dies — escalate the same day. Weekday phone for heat. Email for a sentence. Square for a mentor hour. Do not wait for the next orientation video. You already finished those steps. The dashboard will not love you more for suffering quietly. It will show a hole where a Burnaby Saturday needed a human.

Finish the studio steps. Then write the date, the hours, and what you actually did. Short. Factual. Pacific. No stuffing. No secrets. No machine French. No stock people. No silent refunds. That is student work at SYCGeeks. It is how we have brought people into a bilingual Canadian studio since we opened the student view. The log is small on purpose. The week is real. Save the line. Then stop.

If you want more responsibility later — watching a processor under care, sitting a launch, writing a quote draft — it will show up as better lines in this log, not as a title you gave yourself. We promote from sentences we can read. “Unblocked HST on Ontario shipping for the Montreal retailer; merchant approved in notes; no live refunds” is a sentence we can read. Start there. The rest of the studio is the same voice. You already heard it in orientation. Use it every time you save.