Internship with the Digital Communications team – Laura Just Fung
When I started this internship I was the picture of a nervous new intern. Even though working remotely isn’t such a new concept anymore, working from a very different timezone was a departure from the usual. But luckily, right from the beginning, I felt as though I was a contributing member of the team.
I and my fellow intern, Olivia, were able to keep up to date with the rest of the team with daily meetings in Microsoft Teams. There was also the occasional extra briefing on new tasks or projects. Being able to message each other in the chat made this internship feel far more welcoming and not as if I were typing away in my room into the ether.
The very first project Olivia and I were part of involved updating the undergraduate course pages in the digital prospectus to the new and improved design. The new design would rearrange the way information was laid out on the course pages, making them more useful. Updating them involved quite a bit of copying and pasting. Considering that the undergraduate course pages total over a 100 in number, this was no small feat. I cannot imagine how long it would have taken if I were alone!
After that, we did a variety of tasks and projects, helping out on what needed doing at the time:
- We went through the editorial calendar for June, looking at various pages on the University’s website and making sure that they were up to standard.
- We transferred the sexual misconduct pages to the newer system, editing them for house style in the process.
- We transferred the Accommodation, Conferences, and Events website from an external website to the system the University website uses. For this project, we had greater leeway on how the final result would look while still conforming to the University’s house style.
- We were introduced to Siteimprove, a tool that flags up website issues. With it, we were able to fix several such problems such as misspellings and broken links.
I’m glad to have had the the opportunity to see how digital content management really works behind the scenes. I’ve learned so much about how much thought has to go into designing an online experience so anybody can access and understand your message.
It’s been a wonderful internship and I’m so grateful to the Digital Communications team for having me!