I don’t really understand how we got to the end of August (well, nearly) already. It feels like minutes ago we were welcoming the summer in with our new intern cohort and today is the day that most of our summer internships finish.
I can’t tell you how much I love and appreciate the opportunity to have interns. And this year we’ve had an absolutely awesome group in DLAM who’ve achieved amazing things.
- David Buik has become accessibility tester extraordinaire, and has been working on an amazing project thinking about how to make sheet music more accessible (Diary of an Accessibility Intern, Educated Prompting: Coding without writing a single line).
- Otis Laundon has done amazing work on thinking about the sustainability of our services, coming up with figures we can use for tracking/comparison and with many recommendations on how to improve our services from that perspective. He’s talked to suppliers and also to our Learning Technology Community, not just at Edinburgh but a Scotland wide event too. (Green Web Platform Intern, First 2 weeks, Attributional and consequential methods of Quantifying Emissions, Data is Meaningless).
- Hera Li is a Power BI guru and I’m totally gobsmacked at how easy she’s made building dashboards look. We gave her a load of data and said ‘do something interesting with that’ and literally she just did it. Even some really horrendously complicated data (Data Visualization: The intersection between Science and Art)
- And last but not least (this is an alphabetically ordered list!) Tallulah Thompson. Tallulah is a returner and has worked on a few different projects with us over the years. This time she’s been looking at what data we can collect to give us more insight into lecture recording issues, working with Euan Murray in Learning Spaces Technology and again and again, just amazed me with her coding skills and her willingness to give new things a go (without much guidance). (Identifying movement in lecture recordings).
We also don’t work in a silo! I have had the joy of working with interns in other sections too. Like wonderful Osh Doherty who helped me understand sustainability before Otis joined us, Zbigniew Kanabrodzki who helped me understand the value of green digital design and Julia Coney, one of the Learn Foundations interns who’s been our IS Student Employee Blog editor. And who can forget lovely Dervla Craig who’s been working with us to continue our witchy work.
This is a bittersweet moment – today we have to say goodbye to some of these wonderful interns (sob!) but also I’m happy to say that some will continue working with us part time during semester and I’m excited to see what they do next. For those of you who are moving on to new adventures – you know who you are – I hope you will keep in touch with us so we hear how you are doing and you have a brilliant time, no matter what you go on to do. Thank you for all you’ve done for us!
