Pre-LINK
Link is a three week long internship that juniors at Animas undergo at a company of their choice for 30-40 hours a week. I am going to do my internship at a local company called Stone Age. Stone Age is a company that develops high pressure water blast tools. I am going to work with the marketing department, helping them do various tasks involving social media and trade shows. I didn't really know what I wanted to do for LINK so I just did some research on companies that sounded interesting. Most of them weren't local so it wasn't reasonable for me to intern there. I wound up contacting two different places one wasn't interested and the other was Stone Age. I decided to go with Stone Age because it is a great company that makes cool stuff, many other students had gone there before, and it was close to my house so it was convenient. I hope to gain better understanding of what marketing entails and more about the software they used. I want to bring an insightful eye to the company so that I could help my mentor see things from the perspective of an outsider because I always find that to be helpful when I'm doing something (except for writing). I hope to leave some sort of mark but I'm not sure how or what kind.
Project
I spent a lot of time archiving old photographs with a photocopier and taking new pictures for the marketing department to use on their website but my main project was designing a logo. Every department at the company had to come up with their own logo that said "own it" to promote teamwork and efficiency. I created the sketch or the "framework" for their final logo. I also made a mascot for them for fun, which was Monty the French Bulldog.
Reflection
My background knowledge in art and my ability to quickly absorb information were very useful coming into LINK. Throughout LINK the skill I developed was mainly patience. I spent hours upon hours scanning pictures at the photocopier to no avail. I felt quite useless for a while and I kept thinking about how I could’ve been doing anything else. It wasn’t because my mentors were awful, in fact they were awesome, I was just very unsure of my choices. In the end, I saved my mentors about two and a half weeks of their time so that they could work on more important things so I really wasn’t useless after all. High school interns can of course help with tasks like scanning pictures but they are also more capable of things like designing logos as well. A person should not be judged on their age and I believe that youth should be given opportunities like this to help them prepare for the future. High school is a crucial time when you must decide what you want to do with your life. For me, I still don’t know what I want to do but for most others it really helped them prepare for college and future careers.