Hey! My name is Corinne and I’m excited to introduce myself as Planet Argon’s first intern! I’m currently a student studying art, graphic and web design at Portland State University. I was lucky enough to land an intern position here at Planet Argon.
A large part of my education has been from studying resources on the web. And by “studying” I mean for four or five months I locked myself in my apartment (our rainy season of course) and tried to learn as much as I could about web design and development.
So, as you can imagine, after a while this got pretty lonely. The amount of information out there was daunting. I decided to put my new skills to use and launched a portfolio site in hopes I’d be able to land an internship where I could learn around professionals.
I’d been looking at agencies for a few weeks and I wanted to be somewhere small, somewhere with personality. I joined the Portland Creative List (a great resource, I’d recommend it to anyone) in attempts to network with locals. Planet Argon sent me an email to invite me to their Modern Web Dev Workshop, which along with sounding right up my alley, introduced me to their company.
To be completely honest, this video was the deciding factor on trying to get an internship with them. Of course, their portfolio really impressed me too.
I walked into the interview with the intention of being completely honest about where I was experience wise, and who I am.
We both came to to the conclusion that we were interested in what I could learn with them as my mentor. They looked at is an opportunity to test their mentorship skills. I told them how I was interested in building things and being a part of the web. We decided to try this thing out, though neither of us knew what it was going to look like.
I’ve been here a few weeks and thought it might be insightful to share some of my perspective on how things work around here.
First day, and every day since, everybody is incredibly welcoming and are happy to talk about/share their work processes. The company as a whole is beautifully transparent. In spaces I’ve worked before, there was little indication what people worked on during the day or sometimes even what their role was in the company.
It’s been very different here, I could get an idea from day one the work everyone does. People seem to be excited about filling one specific part of the building/company processes, rather than having a small amount of people to tackle it all, so they can focus on the parts they like to do.
Many projects here are born out of someone’s creative inspiration rather than only necessity. Argonistas find a way to make the project fun and engaging. I feel lucky every day to be in an environment of people who put so much value in creativity.
The amount I learn here and the speed in which I learn it has improved exponentially. So far tasks have been anywhere from making concepts for designs on our internal site, collecting historical events of Planet Argon, or brainstorming ideas/organizing for the upcoming workshop.
I’d recommend to anybody who’s trying to learn to contact agencies that interest you. For me, I wasn’t interested in sifting through a school website to maybe have my resume looked at along with fifty others. I like meeting face-to-face.
But with with flexibility comes unpredictability. Every day I try to come into the studio with an open mind because I’m not always sure what the day will look like.
Thanks for reading, I’ll have more posts in the weeks to come. If you are going to the Modern Web Dev Workshop feel free to say hello, I’ll be attending as a student as well!