First week Friday June 20th – Friday June 27th

The first day at the office was predictably uneventful. I got settled into my cubicle and was sent to work filling out some paperwork for my employment. I spent most of the day meeting co-workers and getting shown around the office. After I was set up with an account and password to access my computer, my supervisor, Gregg, started to show me some of the things I would help work on in the next seven weeks. He also directed me towards the corporate style guide and he started up the NX software and let me play around a bit in it.

I should explain a little about what the office does. They develop an engineering and manufacturing program called NX. The software has been used for all types of projects and products including Legos and one of the Mars Rovers. The department I will be interning with is the Technical Documentation department (TDOC in the corporate lingo). They develop a number of “deliverables” that are released with each new release of the NX software. These deliverables include the NX online help, a section titled “What’s new?”, and the expansive NX tutorial called CAST. On the second day of my employment I was sent to work on this CAST tutorial.

The first full week of my employment consisted of me working with this tutorial. The process helped me become acclimated and comfortable with most of the basic features of the software. More importantly it accounted for the first actual writing experience of the internship. While I was going through the tutorial, my supervisor and Bonnie, the project manager of the CAST tutorial, had me take notes on any errors or problems I found within the CAST tutorial. I recorded any errors I found in a series of Excel documents and eventually e-mailed them to Bonnie once I was finished. I have included some samples of the documents in my portfolio. While going through the Cast tutorial, I found myself referencing their style guide a lot. Most of the errors that I found were very minor including missing punctuation or unparallel bulleted lists.

The rest if experiences were extremely pleasant. Everyone that works here seems to know each other very well. There is a core group of people who have worked here since the late 70’s and they have gone through the growing pains of a small company together. Anytime I have any questions regarding the product I have a number of people with cubes around me that I feel comfortable asking questions at any time.