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Yan Du, 21, has held many summer and part-time jobs over the years, including bartender, waitress and retail saleswoman. But the University of Toronto commerce major is getting her first experience of office life this summer with an internship in the audit group of Ernst & Young.

"The culture is different," Ms. Du says. "For my other jobs, everything was casual, whereas here, with the way you have to speak to clients and other things, you have to maintain the professional aspect. It's a good learning experience."

Like Ms. Du, the class of interns and co-op students making their way into Canadian offices this summer are part of Generation Y, generally recognized as those born after 1980. Technologically savvy and ambitious, they are rarely satisfied with merely fetching coffee, making copies or performing other menial tasks associated with the office summer job. And they have no qualms about making their voice heard.

Lindsey Pollak, a career expert and author of Getting from College to Career: 90 Things to Do Before You Join the Real World, says the difference between younger workers and the old guard was driven home when she heard Randy Falco, the chairman and chief executive officer of AOL, talk about the shocking reception he received from the company's interns and younger workers.

"He said he can't believe the questions they had guts to ask," she says. "They were tough questions he would have never asked [in their position], and they even offered suggestions about changing policies."

To ward off such generational conflicts, Ernst & Young, which has close to 4,000 employees in Canada, takes the somewhat unusual step of educating both existing employees and its more than 100 summer interns prior to setting them loose on each other.

Interns are given training in the basics of office conduct, such as proper attire and e-mail/voice mail etiquette, in addition to learning how the company works. The company also educates existing staff and managers about what to expect from their hard-driving, Facebook-networking summer colleagues.

"At our firm, we've come a long way with the culture and we recognize that education goes both ways," says Daniela Carcasole, Ernst & Young's national director of campus recruiting. "We have training at the partner and manager level to tell them about Generation Y and what their attributes are."

Without that kind of training and education, Ms. Pollak says, an older worker, especially a baby boomer, could experience a culture clash with younger colleagues.

"Baby boomers climbed the ladder, had loyalty to their organization, and started at the bottom and worked their way up," she says, noting that members of Generation Y are less likely to devote their working lives to a slow and steady career climb.

"They want to be CEO tomorrow," Ms. Pollak says. "I think companies can give interns real work. The flip side is students need to learn how to be professional and realize the grunt work of filing and answering phones is also important to becoming a professional and learning how things are done in the workplace."

Laura Addicott, director of the career services centre at Dalhousie University in Halifax, says the shift to the corporate world can also be tough on students.

"Sometimes students are surprised at things like the workplace culture because it's so different from the environment they are comfortable with," she says. "There is a level of responsible action and professionalism expected in today's workplaces ... It can be quite a shock."

Ms. Du says she is enjoying the chance to dress "businessy" for her summer job, and she has already been given more responsibility on a client audit. But would she like to be CEO tomorrow?

"Definitely," she says.

DIVER DOWN

WORST SCIENCE JOBS

This year's winner of Popular Science's annual "worst jobs In science" feature was the "hazmat diver," a unique group of people who "swim into clouds of waste, inside nuclear reactors and through toxic spills on America's coasts and inland waterways." One such person recalled his worst dive, which took place at a pig farm. "A guy had driven his truck into the waste lagoon and drowned," Steven Barsky said. "Not only was it full of urine and liquid pig feces, the farmer had dumped all the needles used to inject the pigs with antibiotics and hormones in there." Other unfortunate science work included being an elephant vasectomist and whale-feces researcher.

BETTER WATCH OUT ...

OFFICE SURVEILLANCE

In a twist on the typical use of workplace security cameras, the government office in Terengganu, Malaysia, is using them to keep staff from "slacking off at work or vanishing for long tea breaks," according to Associated Press. One official told a local newspaper, "We would know if they are adhering to office etiquette or playing truant, and we can also gauge if they are disciplined at work." Sounds like an Orwellian version of Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.

QUOTE, UNQUOTE

PSYCHOS AT WORK

"I think the workplace psychopath is actually more dangerous than the violent criminal psychopath, because the workplace psycho is smart, charismatic, charming and much less likely to get caught. Psychopaths isolate their victims through cutting them out of the lines of communication and then destroy them."

-John Clarke, author of Working With Monsters, in an interview with the Mercury newspaper in Tasmania.

BY THE NUMBERS

POWERING DOWN

1.72

Dollars in billions (U.S.) that American businesses are wasting on energy every year because of employees who don't turn off their personal computers at the end of the day, according to a survey conducted for information technology company 1E and the Alliance to Save Energy, a non-profit group. The survey found that close to half of all office PCs are not properly shut down.

14.4

Number of millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere by the estimated 31.2 million PCs left running overnight.