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.
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