Internships as Prof. Dev., Part 1

10-min. read

This blog post is a collaboration with Eliza Kriz, an amazing writer I studied alongside while completing my bachelor’s degree in Professional and Technical Writing (PTW) at Saginaw Valley State University (SVSU). The two-part article focuses on our experiences as technical writing interns at Cardinal Solutions, a research and design consultancy run by students, faculty, and alumni at SVSU.

Although Eliza and I interned for the same organization during the Fall 2020 semester, we did not work together, as we were assigned to different project teams. Thus, we used this joint reflection as an opportunity to learn about another client, project, and Cardinal Solutions group.

In this blog post (Part 1), we cover a variety of topics:

• New experiences in PTW;

• Interdisciplinary teamwork;

• Overcoming challenges; and

• Strategies and platforms for collaboration.

In my next blog post (Part 2), we will cover additional topics:

• Areas of study/interest unrelated to PTW;

• Applied insights from PTW coursework;

• Remote internships; and

• Benefits to professional development.

During Fall 2020, Eliza was a junior in the PTW program and an intern at Cardinal Solutions, where she worked as the technical writer on a project team serving the Saginaw County Prevention Coalition. She is currently completing an internship with JAARS, Inc as a communications coordinator associate.

During Fall 2020, I completed my last semester in the PTW program and an internship with Cardinal Solutions, where I worked as the technical writer on a project team serving Women of Colors. I currently work as an independent consultant at Allison Stein Consulting, LLC. Among my consulting gigs, I am involved with the social media and web content strategy for Cardinal Solutions.

The Teams

Give a brief overview of your client, project, and Cardinal Solutions group.

Eliza’s Thoughts

Our client group was the Saginaw County Prevention Coalition. This organization is actually a coalition of 23 other organizations in the Saginaw community working together to reduce substance abuse in kids and promote healthy family relationships.

Our project with this group was to create an activity book for them to hand out to families and kids at their events. The activity book included coloring pages, mazes, and crossword puzzles, as well as descriptions of all the different partner organizations in the back so that families could have that as a resource.

My Cardinal Solutions group was made up of myself as the technical writer and three different graphic designers who worked on creating the mazes and the coloring pages and putting the book together in Adobe. We also had an illustrator for helping us make the cover of the book.

My Thoughts

Our client was Women of Colors, which is a nonprofit organization that serves the Saginaw community. We were responsible for promoting a variety of their programs through social media, primarily on the platforms of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Some of the programs we were promoting, just to give a sampling, were a coat giveaway for children in need, a STEM program to encourage students to get more involved in technology, and a substance abuse prevention program. My group consisted of myself as the technical writer and a graphic designer, as well as the faculty advisors who were supporting our efforts.

New Experiences in PTW

What was something new that you did that you hadn't done previously in PTW coursework?

My Thoughts

I had the opportunity to engage in regular communication with a real client during my internship. I have done that to some extent for class projects, but in this experience, I was communicating with the client or others from her organization a few times per week, so it was more frequent than what might be expected in an academic setting.

Because I was named the primary contact person within my group, I was responsible for facilitating communication between our Cardinal Solutions team and Women of Colors. I requested photos, asked questions about different surveys Women of Colors had conducted so that we could create social media posts around those statistics, and got in touch with leaders from various programs to find out more. From this, I learned a lot about what I need to communicate—and how I need to communicate—with clients, which was a helpful experience.

Eliza’s Thoughts

The client work was also relatively new for me. I had done a little bit of that kind of work for my grant-writing class where I worked with a client, but it was pretty limited, and it was probably only the last couple weeks of the semester that I was actually in contact with the group, so working closely with a client for Cardinal Solutions was a new experience. I wasn’t necessarily the primary contact, but I was the one who needed to get more feedback because of the nature of my work, so I was communicating with the client a lot more often.

During my internship, I got to make crossroad puzzles and come up with ideas for clues, which is something you wouldn’t normally think about in technical writing, but it was a fun project that I got to do that was a lot different from my other PTW coursework. I was also responsible for writing the foreword that was going to introduce the rest of the activity book. I had never written a foreword before, so that was a new experience trying to figure out what needed to be put in it. I got a lot of helpful feedback from the faculty advisors.

Lastly, I worked on a press release for when the book is completed to announce that Cardinal Solutions made this book for the Saginaw County Prevention Coalition, and it just acknowledges all of the different groups that were a part of the production. That’s something that was new to me as well, but it will be a really valuable experience if I ever need to write a press release for another purpose in the future.

Interdisciplinary Teamwork

What did you learn from working on a multi-disciplinary team?

Eliza’s Thoughts

I really enjoyed being able to work as part of a multi-disciplinary team and seeing what the graphic designers actually do because I know a lot of classmates in the Professional and Technical Writing program who do Graphic Design as a minor, but that wasn’t my choice—I’m actually a Spanish minor. It was interesting to see what they could come up with because it was stuff that I don’t have the skills or the creativity in that way to do.

To see the coloring pages that would come out and the mazes and just how everything was being put together, I think was really neat and gave me an appreciation for what these students are learning and the skill set that they bring to the team. I appreciated it because I’ve worked with other technical writing students in groups before, but to have an interdisciplinary group was a great experience for me. It’s more like what you will experience when you get to the workplace, with different people’s skills coming together.

My Thoughts

I also had a really good experience collaborating with the graphic designer on our team. At the risk of echoing what you said, being part of a multi-disciplinary group gave me a better understanding of and appreciation for graphic design as a discipline. Coming from a PTW background, I consider both technical writing and graphic design elements of information design, so seeing how someone else was working with the same information and where our different areas of professional focus overlapped was amazing.

I encourage anyone working on an interdisciplinary team to communicate with the team members from other disciplines early and often. Otherwise, it is difficult to understand the unique possibilities and challenges other people in the group might and will encounter. Before launching a campaign, the graphic designer on our team and I would talk and create a plan jointly to make sure that the plans we were making were feasible from both of our standpoints. I learned a lot from that experience.

Overcoming Challenges

What was a frustrating or challenging experience, and what did you learn from it?

My Thoughts

One of the most wonderful and challenging aspects of working in partnership with Women of Colors was that this is an umbrella organization that meets the needs of a vast array of people in the Saginaw community. My team was tasked with creating social media campaigns that communicated a consistent organizational identity but appealed to many and varied demographic and psychographic audiences.

For example, Women of Colors hosts four different forums. One of them is addressed specifically at men, one at women, and one at teenagers and preteens. The fourth forum is a conversation about systemic racism that brings in primarily adults regardless of gender. So for those four forums, while my team might have had similar types of content that we needed to get out, such as when the events were taking place or how to register, we needed to market them differently—but not so differently that people would have difficulty associating them with the Women of Colors brand.

The faculty advisors recommended incorporating the Women of Colors logo in every graphic. Our designer also helped the team maintain a consistent visual mood by choosing colors from a single palette throughout the project. These strategies and more helped my interdisciplinary group streamline social media management for this particular nonprofit.

Eliza’s Thoughts

One of the things with working with the Saginaw County Prevention Coalition and so many member organizations was that it made communication a little more difficult. I was working on writing up partner descriptions for the activity book for each of the partners in the coalition, but then getting it to the members and having them respond back involved a lot of back and forth and took a lot longer than I would have liked. So what I learned from that is the length of time it takes to communicate with that client and to make sure I gave them deadlines and explanations of what we needed as a group so that my spokesperson was able to, in her limited time, get back to us on the information that was really needed, not go off on other tangents trying to find something that wasn’t actually important.

So working with the client and having so many partner organizations presented a challenge, but it taught me about communication within the Coalition. They are doing great work, and so it was really great to see all the different perspectives—it was just getting them all together. At one point, I attended a Zoom meeting for the Coalition. It was a little bit crazy because there were so many people from all these different organizations, and they’re all trying to get down to an idea on something and move forward, and when you just have that many people and perspectives, it’s a challenge. But I think it happens a lot when you’re dealing with nonprofits and organizations like this, which is an area that I’m interested in, so it was good to see that aspect now and learn how to adapt to it.

Strategies and Platforms for Collaboration

What strategies and platforms were helpful for collaboration? 

Eliza’s Thoughts

My Cardinal Solutions team met weekly on Microsoft Teams for a half-hour meeting with the whole group. We were able to tell what progress people had made on different parts and make sure we were moving along well. It was really helpful to have that in place because the meetings didn’t always have to be long; they were just a check-in. Is everybody where they need to be? Where do we need to go moving forward? I was able to get feedback from the faculty advisors and other students on what I should work on next.

We also used the Microsoft Teams chat function, a lot of the time just for uploading our different documents so that we could get feedback on them. So it was less about chatting among the group and more about a way to share the different documents instead of sending them all out via email where it’s easier for those things to get lost.

Regarding that, I sent out emails to the faculty advisors when I was working on projects that weren’t at the point yet to be shared with the whole group. So I did a lot of email back and forth within my team, and it was pretty successful because all of us were on our emails regularly and I heard back from people pretty quickly. I also used email when I was communicating with the client for the most part.

My Thoughts

Like your project team, we had a weekly meeting where the faculty advisors, the graphic designer, and I could meet up and talk synchronously. Every week I sent a bulleted list of items the graphic designer and I had worked on in advance of the meeting to foreshadow what we might talk about. I also used email reaching out to the faculty advisors to get feedback on my work, which was helpful.

I primarily used email with the client. Because I was often requesting photos or documents, such as reports with statistics that we were using for the social media graphics, I would then forward them to our graphic designer.

The graphic designer and I used Microsoft OneNote for sharing text that I’d written for future campaigns. So if I had written a campaign about one program, I could put that in a folder on OneNote. In a couple of weeks when she was creating graphics for that program, she could access my text because it was a kind of shared workspace.

And then we used a Microsoft Teams chat for more conversation and feedback between the two of us. If I had a question about a piece of text or wanted her opinion, I could put it there, and she did the same with graphics for posting stuff back and forth and quick questions.

Eliza’s Thoughts

It’s interesting to compare our different groups and how communication worked differently. So just one follow-up question on that, I was curious—I haven’t used OneNote before, so can you describe what kind of platform that is and what it was best used for?

My Thoughts

I did not have much experience with Microsoft OneNote prior to working on this project, but the graphic designer on our team had used it for work, and she found it really convenient. Essentially, OneNote is a shared notebook where you can have different pages. For our purposes, we created a page for each social media campaign—we had a page for the coat giveaway Warm a Child for Winter, the STEM initiative Students and Future Technology, and so on. Then I could access any campaign’s page—there were usually five social media posts per campaign—and add the social media posts as I developed them.

One of the advantages of the OneNote platform was that I could put work in our shared notebook as I got it done. I didn’t necessarily complete a full campaign at the same time—maybe I would be waiting for information in order to write one of the posts—but I could still upload the four out of five posts I was able to complete. Then our graphic designer had everything I had, and she could work when and how it was most convenient for her. So we opted for that some of the time versus email to kind of streamline things because my OneNote uploads didn’t require any immediate back and forth. And then you also knew when you received an email or chat message that somebody more than likely was looking for your response and feedback, so it was easier to prioritize.

Thanks for reading!

If you found this post helpful, check out my featured posts below.

Special thanks to my friend and the talented graphic designer Joanna Nauman, Women of Colors President Evelyn McGovern, and the faculty advisors of Cardinal Solutions at Saginaw Valley State University for the great experience collaborating on my internship project.