My role as an intern within the Highlights Foundation is to assist during workshops and also help out with creating design works for branding. My supervisor is the guest services coordinator of the company, but I also do some tasks under the Development Manager and Executive Director.
Some of the tasks that were not related to design/illustration were updating and organizing the inventory of the campus’ bookstore. It took multiple days for me to check each book and keeping track if the numbers were correct. It wasn’t a heavy work in my opinion and was actually very therapeutic because I was able to discover new authors and artists to check out during the process. The other task that took a good amount of my time for a week was scanning and archiving donated books to be put in the sponsored cabin libraries. The reason why this was a bit of a process was because some of the books were not available on the market that I had to input each information manually.
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I learned about this internship through my Illustration professor. She talked about how working for the foundation creates a lot of opportunities for me to network and also gain knowledge from the workshops I will be assisting. The main thing that attracted me to the foundation is its focus on children’s literature which I want to be a part of as an illustrator.
I reached out to the foundation’s contact page and asked about their internship opening around January 13th. I immediately received a reply the same day, letting me know that there is no definite date yet on when they’re posting calls for applications, but they will be keeping in touch with me. There was a bit of a delay regarding the opening, but I finally heard back from the foundation around April 18th, and I applied immediately. I did not receive an invitation for an interview that was scheduled for May 16th.
The initial interview was done virtually. I was interviewed by the executive director and guest service coordinator. I remember the interview lasting around 30 minutes. One of the main questions was about my ability to work in teams and also if I had any prior experiences that I think could help me for this internship. I was also asked if I was familiar with programs such as adobe suite, slack, and Canva.
