The major project of my internship was the handbook. Aside from a few communication hiccups, there weren’t any issues. Until one day, I was asked by my supervisor if I could come in on Friday for a whole workday. One of the other interns called out sick, so I was expected to finish as much as possible for 8 hours. (I was also asked to stay at the office for 2 more hours on Thursdays to help them meet the deadline.)
The reason for this sudden crunch, my supervisor explained to me, was that the other departments didn’t hand in their research material on time. So for all of Friday, I spent most of my time in the office with my supervisor and one of the college assistants.
As a college student, crunch time isn’t anything new. However, I prefer to avoid it as much as possible. I have vision problems, and constant exposure to electronic light makes it worse. So I planned to take 7 minute walks on occasion. That way, I wasn’t spending all day in front of a computer screen.
What made that workday so stressful was that I also had to work in my co-workers absence. Thankfully I had access to his files, but I felt partially guilty for making so many adjustments to his design. We had decided on a brand-new color scheme, and all of his infographics needed to be updated. Beyond that, there were also font-size changes so that the fonts looked consistent throughout the handbook.
In retrospect, a lot of the time spent doing this could have been prevented via establishing paragraph styles. While we all agreed on using Avenir Next and Times New Roman as the handbook’s fonts, we were never consistent on font-sizes. If we made paragraph styles beforehand, we only needed to open up InDesign and adjust the font-sizes accordingly.
In the end, I did manage to finish my large share of the labor involved. We lost a progress due to the incoming snow days, but I made sure to keep checking my email for work updates.
