Archiving student work is not hard but I do assure you that it is not something to make light of. It’s time consuming. Archiving five years worth of student work in addition to your supervisor’s work as a college student is really a titanic feat when I first started. My supervisor, Manu Garza, had me work out in a side room secluded from the rest of the studio, to allow me to concentrate without any distractions from the rest of the room. I welcomed it since I am a person who distracts easily and wanted to do as much as possible to make sure Manu was satsified with picking me.
It was my first day on the job and I did not want to disappoint. I had bad luck and the last thing I wanted was to give Manu or Meigan reason to regret their decision. Meanwhile, they were interviewing Daniella, the oher intern. By the time their interview with her had ended, I had finished organizing the books into a neatly organized pile, set by year, semester, class and student names, as well as taking their thumb drives and CDs.
I created a folder on my laptop, dubbed et al. collaborative, and created a subfolder named archiving portfolio. In the subfolder, there was a folder for every year from 2010 to 2014 and a special folder for Manu’s college work, with semester, classes and the work of the individual students. I began putting in thumb drives, dropping in the work and threw them back into the pile that I got them from. By the end of the first day, I had gone through most of the thumb drives and started on the CDs. I wanted to finish them all but my time was over and I had to head back to class.
On the second day of my internship, I finished all the thumb drives and worked on the CDs until the drive on my Macbook didn’t work and stopped reading the disks. I had an external CD drive but that didn’t alleviate the situation so I asked Manu to use Meigan’s computer in her absence and continue my work from there. I worked until seven o’clock at night, and had finished everything or so I thought.
On the first day of the second week, I assumed that I was done archiving and organizing everything but Manu found more student work for me to put into the folder. He put me into work on the floppy disks and I used this converter that allowed me to read them, and have the computer treat them as a modern digital storage device. It was a total flashback to 1998 and I enjoyed every moment of it.
By the end of the third day, I was done with the archival portion of the internship and got to work on the design portion of it…
