My name is Kiera. I am studying Zoology, entering my final year, and over the summer, I interned with the Careers and Employability Service and Widening Access team. My job was to create a series of resources directed at pupils aged 10-13 and 17–18 to get them to start thinking a little about careers they’d be interested in after school and to guide them on their next steps once they leave school.
For my older audience, I created an interactive booklet, accessible online and filled out as they complete activities such as quizzes looking at skills, hobbies, and potential next steps. This resource encourages students to think of all their options whether it be university, college, direct access routes, apprenticeships, jobs or gap years. The main messages I intended to convey surrounded the theme of changeability and transferrable skills. Acting as reassurance that if they chose a path they might not want to stick to, they still learn skills that apply to a new career path that might interest them more.
My resource for my younger audience was my favourite to make. I produced a game called ‘Big Bad World’, a simple ‘finding things’ game that asks you to deliver items to different characters based on their jobs. The idea of this game was representation, to show various people of various genders and races in successful positions. The three characters include Prof Ben, a black research scientist (he/him), Officer Yaz, a South Asian police officer (she/her), and Harper, a non-binary artist (they/them). Inspired by early Pokémon DS games, Big Bad World is designed in a large pixel art style in a top-down format.
This game took me eight weeks to complete from start to finish. Given the short time span, the game mechanics are incredibly basic and involve a lot of experimental code. One such example is the animated frog. When walking around the frog, if wearing headphones, it makes noises from different directions. It was my experiment with 3D audio and audio transmitters, which I later used in-game sequences. However, I had grown attached to the frog, so he is still within the game and has no functional use. I had never done any coding before, so taught myself game-maker language (GML) using tutorial videos. After two months of drawing single frames for every animation in-game, I was dreaming in pixels, but my game was complete and was published publicly on GX.games.
I learned loads from this internship. From how to approach office culture, to coding, and how university services interact. I also had to communicate with very different audiences. Speak with my manager, present at the intern event, and the actual creation of resources directed at differing age groups. I switched between professional and informally approachable constantly to maintain good office relationships and still relate to my target demographic.
I was very much in charge of my work schedule, merely ensuring that my manager was okay with my next steps, but other than that, I worked away at my own pace. I quickly learned the importance of a break as I was routinely told to go for walks and coffee breaks.
Overall, this was a great experience where I did more than I thought myself capable of and made some great connections with career professionals and my fellow interns.
