My Internship Experience: Refreshing research
Words by Jason, BSc (Hons) Earth Sciences
My name is Jason and I recently finished a ten-week internship in the School of GeoSciences communications team. The goal of my internship was to integrate information about the research conducted in the school (which had been on a “subsite” – a website within a website) within the main School of GeoSciences website. Doing this also gave me the opportunity to restructure and re-write content as we moved it into the main website. The “Research” section on the website you see today is the result of my work!
Our newly updated research section
Refreshing the School of GeoSciences research pages
The process of integrating these webpages first involved background research of what our intended audience is and best practice from other similar organisations. The existing content about our research was then mapped out, and sorted into what would be kept, rewritten or restructured, or what we could do without. I then made a demonstration website with my proposed changes which was sent out to staff for feedback. All of this was kept on a Gantt chart on our Teams channel to keep us organised and give a visual indication of our timeframes and goals.
Asking and interacting with academic staff can be scary, especially as a student intern. Being in GeoSciences means that you forge a really close bond with academic staff, as you will be living with some of them during your fieldwork! The staff I’ve interacted with have all been supportive of me and my work, it’s their research that I’m improving the visibility of!
Check out our Research section
Getting to see the school behind the scenes as a staff member myself was cool, there are many important jobs being done that I wasn’t even aware of as a student. However, the highlight for me was certainly the end of academic year summer barbeque!
I also worked on a variety of other projects on the which will help inform future development of the website you’re reading this article on! After reviewing feedback from staff, enacting a few changes, and smoothing out a few bugs the new “Research” section was live! Just in time for the end of my internship.
Communicating effectively, organisation and management skills, thinking creatively are all highly valuable skills that I have used and developed in my time as an intern, and are highly useful in my personal and professional development.
The value of internship experience
This internship has helped me learn a lot.
Firstly, as GeoSciences student, it was interesting to see the wide array of research conducted in the school – we are involved in alcohol licensing, dinosaurs, space, glacier/forest/carbon monitoring, and so much more! In our courses we don’t cover in much depth the research our school conducts or the real-world impacts of them as we’re too busy learning the ropes to be GeoScientists ourselves.
Secondly, I’ve learnt a lot about who I am and the internship has helped me gain confidence and skills that I hope to use for the rest of my degree and in my future career.
Communicating effectively, organisation and management skills, thinking creatively are all highly valuable skills that I have used and developed in my time as an intern, and are highly useful in my personal and professional development.
I was intimidated by the prospect of this internship at first, and I suffered from a lot of impostor syndrome, but the team made me feel welcome and were happy to help with any questions or requests for feedback that I asked.
I hope my work helps showcase the incredible work done in the School of GeoSciences, and working as a staff member was super insightful! I would highly recommend a summer internship at the school as it’s a really good way to boost your CV, experience working in Higher Education, and earn some money too!
(Most of my earnings went straight to my cat.)
Finally, I would like to thank the GeoSciences Marketing, Recruitment, and Communications team for being absolutely brilliant co-workers and all-round very cool people.
Share
