This week, my challenge continues to be 'thinking virtually'. I completed my report and submitted it to my site supervisor last week. I'd received my feedback yesterday. While she said that overall the report was 'good and solid', she asked that I change my citations to links. I'd never thought of that. As a college student, I've been taught to cite things in parenthesis at the ends of sentences. So when our instructions said to 'cite' our sources, I proceeded as per usual. Linking in Word documents is not the most challenging thing to do, nor is it a new feature. I'd just never needed to use it before and I'd certainly never been encouraged to explore more advanced MS Word features before.
(The table of contents creator in MS Word continues to amaze me. Then again, in academic papers, we're generally not asked for a table of contents so I've never used it before. It's so easy, now I want to put a table of contents in every paper.)
For this week, I will be going back and putting citation links into my report (today) and then awaiting further instructions from my site supervisor. It's hard to believe but we're already half way through the semester.
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Sunday, March 18, 2012
The Report and The Practice
This week, I completed my trends report on social networks. I'm seeing that transcribing the interviews helped me learn much more about social networks and the business world before compiling materials for this project. While it is a bit ironic that I decided to deactivate my personal Facebook page just before starting this project, a lot of what I learned did reflect what I'd seen over the course of my Facebook use the past eight years.
While I managed to set and keep my own deadlines, communication can be a challenge in a virtual internship. I suppose it may be due in part to the way this particular internship is structured, but it can be easy to forget or misunderstand. Our contacts with each other and our site supervisor are generally brief and to the point. We get directly to what needs to be said and then move on. As we work independently, there is no real 'need' for communication except to update our supervisor on our progress and to notify her of any concerns or questions we have. As distance learners in an online program, working independently is not necessarily a problem as we do this a lot for other classes, but communicating can be a challenge. Learning to work in a team over long distances continues to be a challenge just because we become so used to setting our own dates and working on our own terms and with our own expectations that we sometimes forget that in a team or with a supervisor, their expectations can be different than our own.
While I managed to set and keep my own deadlines, communication can be a challenge in a virtual internship. I suppose it may be due in part to the way this particular internship is structured, but it can be easy to forget or misunderstand. Our contacts with each other and our site supervisor are generally brief and to the point. We get directly to what needs to be said and then move on. As we work independently, there is no real 'need' for communication except to update our supervisor on our progress and to notify her of any concerns or questions we have. As distance learners in an online program, working independently is not necessarily a problem as we do this a lot for other classes, but communicating can be a challenge. Learning to work in a team over long distances continues to be a challenge just because we become so used to setting our own dates and working on our own terms and with our own expectations that we sometimes forget that in a team or with a supervisor, their expectations can be different than our own.
Sunday, March 11, 2012
The Intern Who Wasn't
I had dinner with one of my friends earlier this week who is doing an in-person internship (in a different field). Having been an intern before, I've found that every site and site supervisor operates differently. Talking with my friend over dinner, I found that her experience was very different and yet very similar to my own experiences.
It would be worth noting that she is working in a lab at a fairly reputable academic institution who work with a lot of interns. They seem to have a fairly well established bureaucratic hierarchy that allows them to delegate tasks and manage their interns in a way that is quite different and yet somewhat similar to the way our virtual internship is managed.
After our intern group meeting this week, I began thinking more about the differences and similarities between her experience and mine.
Both our schools require a class to support our intern experiences. She didn't say much about her class so I suppose that when compared to the actual internship it's somewhat unremarkable.
Her internship site is very different from mine. In addition to the obvious factors like her site being a science lab and mine having nothing to do with science and the simple fact that she goes in in-person and I am a virtual worker, she works with a large organization whereas I work with a small one. While both our site supervisors offer support and guidance, her site appears to take on more of a teaching role in that they assign mentors to their interns who act as task masters, supervisors, and career counselors.
One thing that stood out to me from our meeting this week was the notion of being alone on the internet, especially with a virtual internship. Our blogs and class meetings sometimes feel like a one-way conversation. You put your piece out there and people read and observe. Sometimes comments are made or questions are asked but you never really know how to respond and sometimes questions go unanswered. (I've always resisted posting simple 'I concur' comments. It feels like sending a text message with a smiley or a 'lol' and nothing else, but I understand that the silence can be a little scary and discouraging.) My friend's internship site, with its large pool of interns, faculty, grad students, PhD candidates, etc, hosts weekly non-work-related meetings for all its student workers to network and mingle (and drink beer). While I don't think this is necessarily the most practical for virtual interns, the internet does offer a host of other opportunities for people to gather and talk.
In taking on this internship, I've learned a lot about virtual worlds and I think that there is a lot of potential there. Based on my own personal experience, I would say it's a great place for people to meet, gather and chat, but based on what I've learned so far, there are a lot of limitations to making them an accessible gathering place (in addition to the fact that 'virtual worlds' are expanding and redefining themselves in light of changes to social media).
Overall, I think that a virtual internship has a lot of opportunity to function just like an in-person internship but the new, virtual world seems to have created a disconnect in the way we communicate with each other, thus limiting the ways we think about working together when we're not physically together.
I've set my goal of completing my report by Monday (tomorrow) and the deadline approaches, but first... a midterm.
Until next time....
It would be worth noting that she is working in a lab at a fairly reputable academic institution who work with a lot of interns. They seem to have a fairly well established bureaucratic hierarchy that allows them to delegate tasks and manage their interns in a way that is quite different and yet somewhat similar to the way our virtual internship is managed.
After our intern group meeting this week, I began thinking more about the differences and similarities between her experience and mine.
Both our schools require a class to support our intern experiences. She didn't say much about her class so I suppose that when compared to the actual internship it's somewhat unremarkable.
Her internship site is very different from mine. In addition to the obvious factors like her site being a science lab and mine having nothing to do with science and the simple fact that she goes in in-person and I am a virtual worker, she works with a large organization whereas I work with a small one. While both our site supervisors offer support and guidance, her site appears to take on more of a teaching role in that they assign mentors to their interns who act as task masters, supervisors, and career counselors.
One thing that stood out to me from our meeting this week was the notion of being alone on the internet, especially with a virtual internship. Our blogs and class meetings sometimes feel like a one-way conversation. You put your piece out there and people read and observe. Sometimes comments are made or questions are asked but you never really know how to respond and sometimes questions go unanswered. (I've always resisted posting simple 'I concur' comments. It feels like sending a text message with a smiley or a 'lol' and nothing else, but I understand that the silence can be a little scary and discouraging.) My friend's internship site, with its large pool of interns, faculty, grad students, PhD candidates, etc, hosts weekly non-work-related meetings for all its student workers to network and mingle (and drink beer). While I don't think this is necessarily the most practical for virtual interns, the internet does offer a host of other opportunities for people to gather and talk.
In taking on this internship, I've learned a lot about virtual worlds and I think that there is a lot of potential there. Based on my own personal experience, I would say it's a great place for people to meet, gather and chat, but based on what I've learned so far, there are a lot of limitations to making them an accessible gathering place (in addition to the fact that 'virtual worlds' are expanding and redefining themselves in light of changes to social media).
Overall, I think that a virtual internship has a lot of opportunity to function just like an in-person internship but the new, virtual world seems to have created a disconnect in the way we communicate with each other, thus limiting the ways we think about working together when we're not physically together.
I've set my goal of completing my report by Monday (tomorrow) and the deadline approaches, but first... a midterm.
Until next time....
Sunday, March 4, 2012
One-Third Point
Midterms are coming which marks the one-third or mid-way point (it's been five to six weeks already) of the semester.
This week's internship challenge: accomplishing my assigned task. After my last post, I received details about my next assignment: a report on trends in social networking with an estimated completion date of 'two to four weeks'. Two weeks have already gone by. I've done the necessary preliminary reading but have yet to actually write anything. As a result, I am determined to set goals for myself so that I don't drag it out to the entirety of the four weeks.
This week's life challenge: Being ill, but still healthy enough to go to work. I never have a fever but I'm always fatigued and semi-permanently attached to a box of tissue.
As a result, I am aiming to have a draft completed by Tuesday morning before work (fingers crossed that my work schedule doesn't change again). If all goes well, I will be ready to submit my final draft by Friday or Saturday.
I suppose it's not safe to admit your faults in a professional environment but I do find this internship a challenge with a lack of designated due dates. At work, I perform better when my supervisor gives me tasks to be completed before I leave for the day or before a certain time. For the remainder of the internship I will work to improve on setting my own deadlines in order to have my projects completed before the maximum time allotted.
This week's internship challenge: accomplishing my assigned task. After my last post, I received details about my next assignment: a report on trends in social networking with an estimated completion date of 'two to four weeks'. Two weeks have already gone by. I've done the necessary preliminary reading but have yet to actually write anything. As a result, I am determined to set goals for myself so that I don't drag it out to the entirety of the four weeks.
This week's life challenge: Being ill, but still healthy enough to go to work. I never have a fever but I'm always fatigued and semi-permanently attached to a box of tissue.
As a result, I am aiming to have a draft completed by Tuesday morning before work (fingers crossed that my work schedule doesn't change again). If all goes well, I will be ready to submit my final draft by Friday or Saturday.
I suppose it's not safe to admit your faults in a professional environment but I do find this internship a challenge with a lack of designated due dates. At work, I perform better when my supervisor gives me tasks to be completed before I leave for the day or before a certain time. For the remainder of the internship I will work to improve on setting my own deadlines in order to have my projects completed before the maximum time allotted.
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