WheelWorks? It Certainly Does! – My 90 Hour Long Internship Experience
Developing The Self From Internship Experience
My name is Ryan Jackman. As of the time of writing this blog, I am twenty one years old and study English and Creative Writing at Queen’s University. As I was finishing up the final essays of my second year, multiple different internship opportunities arose and I applied to many of them in hopes of being hired. Eventually, WheelWorks sent an email stating that they decided to take me on as a digital marketing intern. I was overjoyed and excited to see what it would entail!
It was a ninety hour internship that would take place over the course of six weeks from the nineteenth of May to the seventh of July with a brief meeting on the fourteenth of May to meet the team and discuss scheduling. Everyone on the team was very pleasant and inviting. At no point during the internship did I feel unwelcomed or shunned.
As a digital marketing intern, many of my tasks revolved around writing up posts and blogs that would be put up on WheelWorks’s social media accounts and website based on workshops and events held by the team. There were some other tasks involved such as tidying up WheelWorks’s Sharepoint by organising pictures into separate folders for easier access to photos which, admittedly, took a while to fully sort out just because of the sheer quantity of photos! Additionally, I interviewed people on occasions and had to ask questions in order to obtain the information required to create an accurate and interesting to read blog. I did this for both the ‘Living Together as a Community’ mural and CREATE AGAINST HATE blog posts and they were quite enjoyable to do.
There were two workshops that I had attended over the course of my time at WheelWorks. The main one would have been the unveiling of the ‘Living Together as a Community’ mural at Malone Mews and the subsequent workshop at the Morton Community Centre where I had taken many notes for future blog and social media posts and helped with the cleaning up, the latter of which being a bit more of a struggle than expected. Fabric marker stains on tables surely put up a fight! The other was slime making where I wasn’t present at the actual workshop but did help test whether the slime making materials would work in preparation for the workshop. It was a fun activity but very messy. My hands had never been greener!
I was under the tutorship of Ruairí Jordan who was the one who taught me the mechanics behind websites I had never used before such as Sharepoint, Squarespace and Buffer, how to use a handheld camera, how to access digital analytics among other things. While Ruairí was the main person teaching me, the others on the team would also help if I was in need of assistance.
Overall, I believe my time at WheelWorks was an enhancing experience. Through this internship, I have learned multiple different skills that will assist me in the future that I would not have known otherwise. I believe that this is a fundamental step towards the career I’m aiming towards, that being a writer, and I am very grateful to be part of the team even just for a brief moment.