The Internship

       About the job: I work as a interactive multimedia assistant at CED3. We are a medium size department (by my standards). CED3 is structured as follows: there are 3 Instructional Designers who work directly with Professors to come up with designs for coursework or special tools. The Instructional Designers work as project leads or producers and pass work on to the Media Developers, of which there are 2. The Media Developers build modules or programs to fill the needs of the instructional designers. They do a lot of the construction and planning of websites and software tools. When they need something drawn or created they may pass it on to the Graphic Designers, of which there are three. This is a very formal look at the hierarchy, as most everyone helps in various capacities, and roles are not so concrete. I support all these groups as needed, and will help any department in fixing or editing or constructing different parts. For instance, this is my third week there and so far I have been called to edit audio clips in Soundbooth and Premiere, edit articulate presentations for content and typos, fix the edits in articulate and Powerpoint, assist in the making of and appear in instructional videos, take part in script read-throughs, test new software, and my main job is migrating coursework from the old platform Blackboard into the new one Sakai, which involves actually building a whole new website for each course.

In addition to the positions described above CED3 has 2 people working in student services, 1 person in IT support, 2 people in administrative support, an administrative officer head and a department director. We all work together to accomplish the goal of producing excellent educational media. I've gotten to know these people and everyone is exceptionally nice and supportive. There are couple more employees whom I have not met as they live across the country and tele-commute in.

       A curious thing about the workplace is the division of employee catagories. The majority of positions I described above are independent W2 contractors. They officially work for a government contracting company. Everyone working in the actual office I wok in are contractors except me, I am a GS Government employee. There are only a few government employees in the entire department and they are the administrative people, the IT guy and the department heads. This is only a curiosity as we all work together toward our common goal.
       The culture around the workplace is a fine one, but I'm still very new and learning about the systems.
Towards that I am open and eager to learn from everyone I work with. I am afraid of being found disingenuous  as I am wide eyed and jubilant and eager to please, yet I am 37 YO and look the way I do. Soon enough people will learn that this is my real personality and I am genuinely excited to work in this department and I go about life with a jubilant air.

Let me discuss some things I hope to learn in this internship:
Software: I have commercial experience with Adobe Illustrator and working knowledge of MS Office, but I see that I am soon to become Expert with these plus several other software programs. I've already had to jump into a few programs that were new to me and actually produce output that will be used in course material for the Navy. These programs were: Camtasia, Articulate, WebDav, Blackboard, Soundbooth, Sakai, Elluminate and Premiere.
Before long I will have these mastered as they're used daily in our operations (except blackboard, which is being phased out)
In addition to those I expect to obtain professional level experience with Dreamweaver, PowerPoint, Excel, After Effects and the whole Adobe Suite.
I intend to improve my collaboration skills as we are all called on to work as a team and we are small enough that each member has responsibilities. We are also small enough that I will be meeting with faculty and clients to discuss their media needs and will one day represent the department and lead projects. This will help me become a professional art director, project manager, instructional designer, media developer and interactive designer. Although our department has the divisions I've described, we are of a size that everyone does most things, and so I will fill all roles eventually. I am just so happy with my new job!