Making Internships Easier for Interested Students

Plexuss 2021 - 2022

About

Our team was tasked with revamping and repurposing our old internship area & process. I led the redesign and championed a more user friendly portal for students interested in internships.

My Role

Lead Designer

UX / UI

Q/A

I oversaw the complete design process for all aspects, ensuring they were optimized for mobile web, desktop, iOS, and Android. I collaborated closely with our marketing and data science teams, who played key roles in shaping the internship programs.

Why?

We repurposed this into an internship portal instead of a content submission portal to provide more benefit to students.

Requirements

Create a self sufficient internship process where minimal intervention was needed due to lack of resources of our small team

CMS component to easily manage internships/modules

Qualifying quiz

Easy format

We created the learning materials to be in an easy to read format so anyone could pickup where they left off. To achieve this we created modules and opted for more of a timeline view, so someone at a glance could see how much they've completed and where they left off.

Moments of delight

I am a big fan of adding moments of delight where applicable so I tried to do just that by including some animations for completing a checkpoint, quiz and internship certificate award process.

Managing internships

A CMS was part of the requirement by the data science & marketing departments. To make this exactly what they wanted I asked them what information was most important when reviewing applicants as well as what actions would be most important to perform and optimized the design accordingly.

Outcomes

We had planned to have 3 different internships (Content writing, graphic design & web development) but ended up only running one cohort (content writing). Hear what some of the interns said about the internship

Impactful
This internship was impactful in ways I never expect when I applied. The tasks were incredibly engaging and are designed in a way that guarantees to strengthen your writing and marketing skills. Anyone would benefit from this experience no matter what field they are interested in; the skills you will gain from completing this internship can be applied to any career. This experience was actually what reaffirmed my love for writing and made me discover my interest in marketing which was a field I wasn't seriously thinking about when I applied. The feedback was always very constructive and in-depth which further allowed me to grow as a writer as I learned new ways of reevaluating certain aspects of my writing. I've learned so much from this experience and am honestly so glad that I applied.
Danielle
22' Content Writing Cohort
Eye-opening experience
When I started this internship, I was pleasantly surprised by its formatting. I worried that I might be thrown into work that I didn't understand yet and make several mistakes. I definitely made mistakes here, but everything was part of the learning process. I thoroughly enjoyed the structure of this internship. I found the feedback especially helpful because I always knew what I needed to improve instead of just being told I did something wrong. Yes, there were some issues at times (technical and otherwise), but I believe that I gained so much from interning with Plexuss.
Saba
22' Content Writing Cohort
I gained so much from interning with Plexuss
This internship was impactful in ways I never expect when I applied. The tasks were incredibly engaging and are designed in a way that guarantees to strengthen your writing and marketing skills. Anyone would benefit from this experience no matter what field they are interested in; the skills you will gain from completing this internship can be applied to any career. This experience was actually what reaffirmed my love for writing and made me discover my interest in marketing which was a field I wasn't seriously thinking about when I applied. The feedback was always very constructive and in-depth which further allowed me to grow as a writer as I learned new ways of reevaluating certain aspects of my writing. I've learned so much from this experience and am honestly so glad that I applied.
Beatrice
22' Content Writing Cohort

Fun Fact

During this time I was researching Duolingo & Salesforce Trail head to get some inspiration. I loved the animation and gamification that Duolingo brought to its app. I wanted to achieve the same level of animations but I did not have the time to create animations from scratch so I learned about Lottie and repurposed some existing free animations to fit our brand which are shown above.

Walnut Creek, CA