I’ve been at my internship for quite a while, about two years now so I’m beginning to get different responsibilities. To give a summary, I work with the Faculty Commons Design team for Citytech. When I originally started at this internship we worked in an office in the Citytech building, but the pandemic changed that halfway into my second semester with the team. Since the pandemic hit, quite a few of the full time designers on the team have left and I am now starting to become one of the senior designers on the team.
Since many designers have been leaving, we also have been hiring more and at this point I would say we currently have the most interns I have seen on the team since I joined. Due to this I now am taking more of a leadership role on the team. Me and 3 of the other senior designers now have the responsibility of overseeing the newer interns. Our roles include emailing them for status updates, joining them on zoom meetings and critiquing their work.
Aside from overseeing the new interns, on week 2 I did not do much of my own work. At the beginning of every semester we generally re-contact our clients and wait for them to get adjusted before working.
I’ve attached a photo of a discord server(messaging channel) that me and the senior designers created to keep in contact with the newer interns.
This week at Faculty Commonsjust like last week, I also have been engaging in more of an overseeing position. Every senior designer on the team has been assigned a specific intern to work with and check in weekly to mentor. Rather than receiving my own project to work on, my mentee received a project. She was tasked to update an already designed poster for the honors scholars program’s 23rd research mixer.
Since the poster was already designed we pulled it from our database of designs for the intern to work on. We used to keep our designs stored on a computer with a backup, but we have transitioned to using dropbox since the quarantine. I told the intern where to look to retrieve the file to start working on it using the info given in the clients email. After doing some work she sent me and the client a draft.
In her client email, she communicated well introducing herself and requesting to meet on zoom as we had trained the new interns to do. During the meeting I joined her as her and the client discussed deadlines and expectations. After the meeting I gave her feedback on the questions she asked the client as well as on the draft she showed me. Moving forward she finished the update in under two days and the client was satisfied with the response time and final product.
