August 4th - 8th

My last week as an intern. I took Wednesday off to pick my family up from the airport. The rest of the week was spent finishing up the radial toolbar documentation. This included having it peer reviewed and edited, as well as making changes after each. I also did a little side project for the usability group. They had me document the changes in the user interface (menus, toolbars) that happened from the last release to the current one.

Friday the documentation team went out to lunch to celebrate my last day and the introduction of a Dawn, a new team member. On Friday I also had my exit interview with Gregg. He told me that I would probably have the chance to do another internship with the company next summer as long as their budget could support it.

Gregg had hinted at this earlier so it wasn't unexpected but it is definitely exciting nonetheless. Gregg, Carey, and Swarna have all been very complimentary towards me about my efficiency, learning speed, and quality of work. Although I would (in private) argue that I hardly got enough work to prove my capabilities, I am very grateful that they thought I did a good job.

Other than the fact that I didn't get a lot of difficult tasks to tackle, I thought that this internship was a great experience. I was able to get a glimpse of what it would be like to have a real 9-5 job in a corporate setting. I learned that a job like this is more like a marathon than a sprint. I also learned that even the simplest of tasks can become time consuming in a cooperation because you must approach and accomplish things the way that the establishment wants you to, even if you think you can do it faster another way.

Thinking of ways that I would make the documentation team more productive and consistent would be to expand the current style guide. I wouldn't change anything about the use of commas or anything like that, or even remove existing content. I would most certainly add whatever unwritten rules the team has about their approaches to organization, etc. The team has opinions about how help topics should be named and what kind of terminology to use, but these opinions are not documented anywhere. Often things are brought up in meetings and resolved, but these new conventions are not documented so I imagine the team will have to review the same conventions in a few months from now. Overall the team (around 12 writers with a ridiculous amount of content to cover) does a fairly good job of staying consistent, but that is just one thing that might help them a little bit.