Internship with the Digital Communications team – Isla Evans
Isla Evans, a 4th-year geography student, has just completed a six-week internship with the Digital Communications team. You can read about her experience in her own words below.
I wasn’t sure what to expect from a fully remote internship, working from my room with a kitten for occasional company. But right from the start, I’ve been made to feel so welcome and part of the team.
In this internship, Piotr and I have updated the undergraduate course pages in the digital prospectus to enable information to be automatically inserted from a database. This is useful when information changes over time, such as entry requirements and tuition fees. Previously, every time these 110 pages needed an update, each individual course page had to be edited manually! It’s important to keep these web pages up to date as many potential students and their families rely on them to decide between universities and courses.
Updating these pages involved transferring information from the old course pages to new pages in the content management system. This process involved a lot of concentration, following a detailed procedure that took about 15 minutes per course.
Beyond this task, we’ve both been able to get stuck in with the team’s other ongoing work. For example:
- We gave opinions as student users on various new developments for the website
- We joined three training seminars – writing for the web, accessibility training and developing a social media strategy
- We were introduced to website analytics
- We learned how to fix small website issues such as misspellings and broken links with a tool called Siteimprove
- I was also able to get involved with creating content for returning students on the accommodation pages.
Daily short morning video meetings kept everyone connected and on track. Using direct messaging in Microsoft Teams (rather than just emails to communicate) also created a friendly atmosphere.
I’m extremely grateful to have had this opportunity to work with the Digital Communications team. I’ve learned so much from this internship about what is involved in maintaining the University website and how much detailed work goes on behind the scenes. I’ve also gained some valuable skills which I’ll be able to take forward to any future career.
These six weeks have really flown by, and I’ll definitely miss working with this amazing team. Thank you for having me!