My name is Malin, I’m going into my third year of Neuroscience with Psychology, and I’m the Student Intern for the Centre for Academic Development.
My view on my way to work
Starting out
I was hired to create materials and strategies to raise awareness of MyAberdeen’s new updates, such as the Ultra Course view change and the presence of alternative formats (Ally), and take part in other MyAberdeen and online learning related projects. My tasks have varied from video script writing and quick guide creations, to testing whether memes could be used to raise student awareness of MyAberdeen. (Spoiler alert, we dropped that last project, but here are two of them)
The problem
As I was familiarizing myself with the websites and the resources the university offers to students, I found myself constantly thinking “This is so useful! I had no idea this existed” over and over again. As I told my friends about my discoveries, the most common response was “oh, why has nobody told me about this before?”. So, as there already is a large amount of resources and information present, I realized that the best approach to this problem would be to find a way to give Students a more manageable overview of these resources.
The naturally occurring detour
The way I’ve gone about doing this in has mainly been to work on visual promotion. As part of this I’ve started to learn photoshop, something I find very exciting. I’ve this far created various posters, and small quick social media images, giving quick tips and tricks about MyAberdeen and the university in general. But as a bigger project, I’ve started to draft a suggestion for student equivalent to the staff’s “How do I…?” page, in hope to create a collective landing page for the university’s online resources.
Two of my poster ideas
My experience so far
I can hardly believe that it’s already week 7 of the internship. The time here has just flown by and it’s been very nice. The work I’m doing here is very different from what I do for my degree, so it’s been fun to see how my quite science-oriented skills and approaches have been challenged and developed. This internship has given me the opportunity to explore my more creative side and this department has been very good at listening to my various ideas and keeping me busy.
It’s also been fun to be able to hang out and chat with the other interns about their experiences with their own internship projects. It reminds you that whatever doubts or questions you have as an intern, you’re not alone and you can occasionally help each other figure things out.
A totally not candid picture of some of this year’s interns
Malin
