I have heard hundreds and hundreds of interns complaining about how boring an internship is and how they are not given enough learnable tasks. I believe this is true as big established firms have polished their operational teams and products that employers can hardly find the right level of tasks for an intern. However, my first and current internship is far from what I`ve heard. It was awesome and gallons of experience juice are pouring every day.
Even friends who went through multiple internships from different fields have claimed mine as one of the most flexible and cool internships. After one of the most challenging interviews I have had last time (More info in my previous blog), I received another internship offer from a fresh start-up company doing web development and CRM system development. The experience so far is like six students running their own start-up, managing major company projects, workplace vibe. my employer would occasionally follow up on our progress and invite industry major contributors to give us talks, assist in our problems as well as provide really useful tips and paths to becoming a web developer. Besides major projects, we have conducted peer presentations on web-related knowledge sharing as a way to learn from each other and give feedback on presentation skills that will be vastly needed in project management as well as the knowledge that will be needed for our major projects.
I was responsible for the UX design and front-end development for our company website and a CRM system website. Since there are no experienced web developers to work side-by-side to teach me and work together, I have my team of five other talented interns to seek help from and a disciplined heart to self-learn every day after work. My employer is also very good enough to provide me with a professional web developer and co-founder of a web developer training centre for me to seek help. I was encouraged to start some online courses from Coursera. From knowing nothing to something, my blank pages of web development are beginning to show colours.
More details of what I did for the UX design and front-end development will have to wait for the next blog when I have completed the overall design.