Internships are hard to come by. Thankfully the ladies at Rhyme & Reason were willing to bring me in and teach me a little bit of what they know and do for a living this summer. I am sad to say that this is my last blog for Rhyme & Reason Design.

I have enjoyed working with Rhyme & Reason Design for many reasons and have learned more than one blog can contain. That is just what happens when you spend time with the R&R ladies, you learn, and I have learned a lot, such as:

1. How to populate a website with text, pictures, and links (internal and external),
2. How to write a blog and maintain a social media website for a company,
3. What sort of maintenance that a company must have in order to function,
4. Logo designs should be like a tasteful outfit in that they leave some things up to the imagination, and
5. Lastly (on this list, but not in reality) that I am going to school for the right profession!

School teaches you the book smarts so that when you join a company you can understand some of the lingo that flies around the room on your first day. It also teaches you how to read quickly and tackle big projects with grace. And where teachers always say start early and keep revising until it is due, Karen reinforced the idea that the design process really does take time. One day she had me do a few sketches and then the next day, after not thinking about it for 24 hours, work on it some more. Over the course of 3 days I learned that there is a process to designing and it can’t be hurried.

School also limits what you see. Textbooks gave me an idea of what you think being a “grown-up” might be like, but they can only tell about what you might experience. Also textbooks don’t update as frequently as the Internet does. Back when the Earth cooled and I was learning to write research papers the Internet was not a valid source; and now it is practically the only thing that people use for research. Another thing about the Internet, the world does not understand what a big undertaking creating a website is, I know I didn’t. Scarlett is a saint for keeping all the copy she handles straight; because between making sure that all the right text is on the correct page with all the proper formatting PLUS matching the appropriate picture or graphic, AND all the links are connected and come up in the correct window it is amazing any website is ever completed!

Another element school doesn’t offer, but an internship does, is experience on a design pitch conference call, or the feeling you get when you learned that the spreadsheets of information you compiled helped the team land a project! Though I may have done some work for them, they have surely helped me far more. Each day was different, and the To Do Lists varied in length and in types of tasks but I am thankful none-the-less for this experience. It has given me concrete evidence that this is really what I want to be when I grow up!

I would advise anyone to go for an internship because until you experience your field of study first hand, you can’t attach any sort of feelings to help you make a decision for your future. Someone once told me that she used to think that she had to decide what she was going to do for the rest of her life after she graduated from college and would be stuck doing that for the rest of forever. Then she worked in the real world for a while and realized that isn’t true. However, it certainly helps to know what you want from your work environment, colleagues, and day-to-day tasks, because if you know that then you should know exactly what you want to be when you grow up!