My summer internship at Guidance is flying by. I just finished my fourth week and have one week left! So far, it’s been an awesome opportunity for me to experience the inner workings of a big eCommerce/Web Development company.
This week I got to work on the Guidance website. One of the fun things I did was to go through our website and look for “call-to-action” items -- which tell the user to do something. Our goal is to make the text of all call-to-action items more intuitive and fun. For example, an item that says “Location” might be changed to “Come meet us!” This project shows how website language and best practices are constantly changing.
I also got a chance to review all of the case studies of prior Guidance clients. It was really amazing to see the variety of websites created by the Guidance teams, and the before and after screenshots. I made sure that the “after” screenshots were all current.
Another highlight from this week was actually getting to work on a client presentation. I helped one of our project managers re-design a Powerpoint presentation that was on an old template. I updated the slide backgrounds and styles to a newer style specifically made for this client. The project manager said that the presentation was a hit! It was satisfying to know that a presentation I worked on made a good impression on a Guidance client.
What I love most about this internship is that I work on specific tasks, but I also get to work on higher-level projects that let me see what’s going on in the entire company. For instance, I’ve been helping to organize progress reports from each of the project managers into a spreadsheet that gets presented to management each week. Looking at the spreadsheet, management can track the progress of all of the projects in one place. They can see which projects are on schedule and which projects might need extra help.
It’s funny to think that I went from sitting in high school chemistry class a few weeks ago, to now helping to prepare company-wide status reports for Guidance. My time at Guidance has been really interesting and I’m looking forward to my final week!
