Category: Blog

During my one-month internship, I discovered my weaknesses of poor communication skills, in addition to spelling mistakes, forgetting some of the work processes and poor working conditions, which made me not do my job well and brought losses to the company. But surprisingly, my supervisor’s evaluation was not as low as I thought. When I was filling out my Internship Evaluation, my supervisor spoke with me and she commented that my design skills were good except for my poor communication skills with clients. I was surprised by my supervisor’s evaluation and it made me realize that I need to work on this weakness more so that I can become a better professional designer.

In this month’s internship, I learned a lot of things and gained a good mentor and friend, so I bought some small gifts for my colleagues to thank them and hope that our friendship will continue.

During the one-month internship, my self-assessment of myself is that I have excellent design skills, but poor communication skills with clients.

I have been teaching myself the use of Photoshop since before I went to college, and it has been 9 years since then. Besides Photoshop I also learned the use of many adobe software during my college years, so I am very confident in the use of design software. In addition to the use of software, I also took a lot of art history courses, so my understanding of design theory is also very good. However, in the real workplace, I found a big problem with me, that is, my communication skills are poor, which causes me not to understand the client’s meaning well when I communicate with them, and I cannot make my design work exactly what the client wants.

I think the reason for my poor communication skills is first because of my introverted personality, which makes me not good at communicating with people, and the second reason is the lack of communication practice. During my college years, I encountered a pandemic, which caused me to spend a large part of my college time studying at home, which made me lack the opportunity to communicate with my professors and classmates. So in order to solve this aspect of my weakness, I will try to communicate more with different people and take courses on communication in the future.

During my one-month internship, I was assigned to work in the design department. The work of the design department is mainly to complete designs according to the clients’ requirements, and my duties are similar, except that I am not yet able to completely lead a project. In addition to the design department, there is also a reception department in the company where I did my internship. The reception department mainly receives customers and answers the phone, and I also worked in the reception department because one of my colleagues took two days off, which led to a shortage of staff, so I also had to receive customers during these two days, which made me feel uncomfortable because I am not a good communicator, which led to me not fully understanding the meaning expressed by the customers. Fortunately, my supervisor helped me to get through these two busy days.

During my internship month, I learned that it is very important to complete your duties in the workplace, because everyone in the company is busy, and if you can’t complete your duties well, it means that another person needs to do your work for you, thus increasing the workload. This simply does not always happen in the real workplace because it represents a lack of your ability and leads to dismissal. So I still have to keep practicing to make up for my lack of communication skills.

My mentor, who is also my supervisor, is very nice and has a similar experience to me. She taught me a lot of things during my month-long internship. In terms of work, probably because of my inexperience, I had some work that the client didn’t like and I didn’t know what to revise, while When I struggled for that, my mentor always taught me what to change and why I needed to change it here, and her suggestions always worked, which I think is because of the experience she gained from working for a long time and knowing the target audience, which is the thing I need to learn.

In addition to my work, my mentor also takes care of me in other aspects, because my internship is offline, I go to work every day, and my mentor sits near me, so sometimes when I am not feeling well, she always notices and comes to care for me, which makes me feel very warm.

I think it’s very important to have a good supervisor, mentor and colleague at work because they can help you a lot in your work and besides the work aspect, your supervisor, mentor and colleague may also become good friends with you and gain a friendship.

After a few weeks of internship, I have adjusted my physical and mental state to do my job better, but so far I am still unable to take full ownership of a project and instead the supervisor releases the project for me to complete.

Among the projects I’ve worked on so far, the one I remember the most is designing a poster for a restaurant chain. When I was communicating with the client, the client was not very clear about the design style they wanted, which made it impossible for me to move forward, so I created some mood boards for the client to choose from and finally settled on a design style. In the real design industry, some clients may have a lot of requirements, they clearly know what they want and the effect, and there are some clients who don’t know what they want, but when you design according to their own ideas, they may raise objections. So I think designers should communicate more with clients and want to create some sketches for clients to choose from so that they can make a job that satisfies them.

I imagined a design firm with a lot of staff and face-to-face interaction with clients, and a project would take weeks or even months, but the firm I am interning at is a very small firm, so it is very different from the design firm I imagined, and the projects the firm mainly receives are short-range and will be over in about a week, which means I need to interact with more clients, which make me not comfortable with it yet, but I’ll try my best.

In the first week of my internship I was mainly familiar with the workflow, although I tried my best to write down the workflow in detail, but I still made some mistakes. This made me realize that I should take each job more seriously, because it is no longer just a task assigned by the professor, but a real business, and my mistakes may bring losses to the customer, so I decided to spend more time to check whether each job is correct.