susanc's blog

I am feeling good about where my writing center freelance project is at. Over Thanksgiving break I spent some time going over all of the original genre guides (the ones that are already posted) and correcting their re-edits and inserting any additional information that has come up. This effectively took care of nine different documents haunting my project folder and I'm pretty sure puts work on all of those original genre guides to a close.

Lately I've been contemplating the difference between academic and professional projects. One of the great things about my freelance work with the writing center is that it has given me a feel for creating documents outside of the classroom.

I had a meeting the other week with the group working on the writing center project. We got together to verify where we all were at in the project and to figure out what needed to be done.

I am officially burned out on blogging about my internship that ended in mid August. I really can't think of anything else to say! And so, for now on I am going to discuss my on-going freelance project with the writing center if that is okay (at least in the blog).

While around 75% of my time at the internship went into the Annual Report, I also worked on building brochures when I had the chance. The previous building brochures were very old and unprofessional looking. They were all created randomly from someone in each building, so there was no consistency between the documents. Plus, most of the clip art used had to have come from the first version of word! When all these brochures were displayed together at the district office, it gave off a very unprofessional look. They definitely needed to be updated and I came at the perfect time for it.

I was having trouble thinking about something to write (since I have been done with the internship since late August) so I pulled out the handy sheet with journal ideas. I will be answering the question "has this experience made you think about possible careers in this field?"

The annual report I produced for Cedar Springs Public Schools was officially printed and it is a success. My advisor showed it to the Board of Education a week or so ago and they all were very happy with it. I feel very pleased that the project is officially over and that everything turned out. As I wrote before I was getting a bit nervous. It feels good to have that weight off my shoulders.

While my internship is technically over, in a way it is still going on. Public schools' annual reports don't need to be made public until fall, so when I finished up my internship in late August the annual report I had worked on all summer hadn't been printed yet.

Before leaving I did make sure to do several trial runs, having the document printed out after edits were made, in order to leave my supervisor with an up to date report and to make sure that everything looked perfect when printed.

I have always been a self-motivated person. I take projects seriously and I like to get things done well and ahead of time if at all possible. I am a very social person most of the time, but when it comes to academic work I tend to favor solitude. These traits have made group projects over the years often frustrate me. I have wondered about their validity as assignments since my middle school days. I would regret that I couldn't just take on the task myself, and in college it can be very hard to organize everyones schedule in order to meet.

I'm thinking that I may have to do more responses than posts this semester, since I did my internship over the summer and it is over with now, but I would like to try and post whenever possible. So here goes...