Well, I’ve been interning for a few weeks so far. Progress update?
It is a little hard to update my ‘progress’ as determing how far I’ve come towards my goals, because I haven’t really set any firm goals for myself. I know that it is probably pretty important to set goals for yourself so you are making sure the experience is valuable, but I think that is a little counter intuitive to how my philosophies on life. This isn’t to say I don’t have goals, but rather than looking at a situation in terms of: this is what I need to get done here, I lookat in terms of: this is the space I am at, now what can I do with it, or what spaces can I carve out of it?
That being said, I think I have accomplished a great deal in terms of building skills and building my portfolio. So far I have copywritten, copyedited, worked with a CMS, edited images, web content development, localized copy for different publications, and written articles for magazine, as well as taken articles through the entire process of researching, editing, and publishing. I think that I am getting to the point where I could probably do more, but I just don’t know what that ‘more’ is yet! The company I am working for has done a great job of finding different things for me to do. There are some old stand-bys (press releases) that I have gotten pretty quick and efficient at – a skill in its own right – but the folks I work with make sure they are getting me new and fresh assignments.
It is interesting, however, that my internship has taken a sort of twist. I came in telling them I wanted to do ‘tech-writing,’ and they told me that they didn’t really do technical tech-writing there. I was ok with that, my response being that tech-writing covers such a wide range of activities that I would like to try whatever part of the spectrum they covered. I was pleasantly surprised when I found out that what they wanted out of me was more of a writer than a ‘formatter’ (if anything, I would perhaps like to do a bit more formatting in terms of working with images and text – hopefully when we start assembling the new magazine). As a result, however, I think I am working my way into an interesting sort of niche. I suppose you could call it ‘content development’ – or copywriter, copyeditor, and any of the work that a content developer might do. I was happy with this at first, because I enjoyed the work, but later I found out that there is quite the market for ‘content developers’ while browsing Craigslist. It seems that regardless of what I do after I graduate this will be a useful experience.
Now I should probably ’set some goals’ for myself and this internship, or maybe I already have. I think that one thing I have discovered that I want to do next through what I’ve been working with is to follow the process of publishing the magazine further. I have written a few articles for it, but I’d like to have a hand in its actual production in terms of layout or whatever else goes into the process. I think that would be a great leap in going from being able to say ‘I wrote for a publication’ to ‘I helped publish a magazine by…’
Also, I would like to get out of the habit of hitting the space bar twice.
