btrax: The Internship Experience

Hello.  I’d like to introduce myself as Erin, one of the new btrax interns.  Lisa asked me to write about my internship experience up to this point, to which I will gladly oblige. But to understand my point of view on my btrax internship experience, I want to tell you a little bit about my work history.

I’ve worked at two other internships within the two years, both for print media, but I’ve never had the opportunity to intern for a web agency.  Initially I wanted to begin my career in website design and HTML/CSS coding, but I slowly gravitated towards print design, as the concepts for me felt a little easier to grasp at that moment.  After my second internship I felt that I wanted to come back into web design since, in the long run, I didn’t want to forget everything I learned about web design and coding.

I started working at btrax a little over a month ago, shortly before Thanksgiving, and the experience has been nothing short of amazing.  What may seem like mundane work to some people is actually very eye-opening to me, as in my past two internships I’ve only worked as a lone in-house design intern at a university organization and a small business, respectively.  Outside of classroom assignments I’ve never worked with a team to complete a project, and so far I’ve learned something new about designing for every day I’ve worked here.

From participation in my first btrax project, I found that even the small tasks (photo editing and inserting chunks of code into pages) could take hours to do, and understandably without someone to take care of the little things it could easily push a project deadline back a day or two. Designers here often work on two or more projects at a time, leaving a very tight time frame for small tasks like photo editing and placing lightboxes into pages.  I helped the team edit product photos, and with my HTML/CSS knowledge I also inserted Javascript and CSS for a photo lightbox as well as write a basic style sheet and some HTML for their photo credit page.  I won’t lie; it was a little intimidating writing code onto those pages because they contained a lot of PHP, and I’ve never dealt with PHP before.  More importantly, I was afraid I would change something that shouldn’t have been changed, ultimately creating more work for the team than they had already.  But careful navigation helped me change what I needed, and by the end of the day I felt tired yet accomplished, even by doing the “grunt work” for the site.

After that first project, I felt I accomplished something great by allowing the designers to work on the more important parts of the project while I took care of the smaller time-consuming tasks.  Web design called to me once again, and I could not resist this time; I’ve finally found my design comfort zone.  While web and print design both have their pros and cons, I felt more accomplished working on a small part of a website than I did with, say, a large poster or a set of flyers for a given event.  This isn’t to say that I don’t love creating print advertising materials, but in the long run I am more motivated to work on web design than on print design.

I continue to be thankful that I am an intern at btrax; this internship feeds my hunger for knowledge about corporate web design and branding.  Before this I had trouble envisioning and designing on a corporate level; I can safely say that now that I’m learning to tune my style to corporate, professional websites and their respective branding systems.  It is mentally exhausting at times to work on a project, but at the end of the day I always go home satisfied with what I’ve done at btrax.

For those who wished instead to skim my entry, the faces on the oranges are (more or less) how i feel when i come to work for btrax every day. 😀