Well, the first week of internship is over and it’s time to recap. First off, now that I’m settled into my house it’s actauly pretty nice. We modeled the living room after Curtis’s living room, that is to say, couch, blankets, chairs, pink and Halo/CoD4. Right now we are watching Transformers on my 22 screen, it’s pretty epic. It’s 3 bedrooms, tiny ass kitcen good sized bedrooms. Downstairs is the other person who lives here, and unfortunately he smokes, so sometimes the house reeks of smoke. Kind of a pain, but what can you do.
But back to the topic at hand, the internship. While all of you fellow INTE’s are doing your own I thought I’d post about my experiences thus far, and add some photos or at least a section in my flickr for them. The first two days were what CM calls “Critical Start” which is meant to indotricate, I mean educate you on CM’s way of doing things, histroy, clients and all the other legal mumbo jumbo stuff they have to do. Thats not to say it was boring, we had a meeting with the chief of finance, and he kept swearing, and talking about past CM employee indiscretions (which Chad and I got to witness on Friday afternoon) and he ended it by giving us the standing offer of buying us beers. On the whole the first two days were long and uneventful.
Day three was research day… let me explain what that means. It means reading a total of 179 powerpoint slides, 27 PDF documents, 40 different websites (including my Ebay of loans website) and about an hour spent trying to make my eyes stop bleeding.
Yah, day three was total information overload, and oddly enough, almost none of it was about my client, it was all pre-research haha… Day four, or Thursday I suppose, was the lots of meetings, brainstormings, and more information dumps. I learned a ton about USAA (my BU’s client) got to voice my ideas (apparently I had two good ones haha) and at the end of the day I started working with Visio.
Friday was a production day for the most part, despite a few wrong turns (re working on the wrong phase of the project for 3 hours) I ultimately ended up creating the first draft wireframes that will be used for that section. Not too bad eh? (I’m sure everyone else is doing something more exciting but I’ll take what I can get) The afternoon was spent watching old CM movies (including a hockey office enforcer, watching BU manager’s fight over IT people, and a very early CM warning movie about online sales (pre the whole internet sales becoming a reality) There was beers, vodka coolers, wine, this was followed by facebooking and digg for the last 45 minutes (most other people left after that but being a intern I figured I should stay.
Unfortunately I can’t talk alot about what I’m doing, the client is USAA a banking/insurance company that caters mostly to US military personal. What I can say is that the project has the chance to re-define what online presence banks and insurance company’s have, and the way their clients view them. Plus, I apparently get to work on mobile work too, which will be awesome.
In all honesty this hasn’t been a huge production week, I spend a lot of the time brainstorming or attending meetings to discuss the progress or listening to client interviews. I am kind of missing exacly what my job is though, there doesn’t seem to be hard defined jobs or tasks for me. Cheryl my mentor is a nice woman, a little scattered but clearly a veteran IA, but I am really wanting a more clear goal. Oh well, I am looking forward to next week, CM culture is quite relaxed (I wore a button down shirt and got accused of going to a job interview (There’s a running job at CM, if you dress up, you must be doing to another job interview.) alot of people spend time watching youtube or in the case of the woman who sits next to me, shoe shopping. I’m not totaly positive CM is were I belong, but the first week is always strange. As for the week, production wise there hasn’t been anything I can’t handle, Visio is a weird program, very touchy, but I’ll get used to it.
Anyway this post is long and rambling so I’ll cut it short now, to my fellow INTE’s, good luck and may your second weeks continue to be excellent!