What were your main duties and responsibilities during the course of your internship?

The main responsibility of my role was updating the College of Humanities’ research pages using the university’s content management system (CMS) – in particular their research centres, projects and networks.

My first main project was transferring the research centre websites into the University content management system for the REF assessment, so that our research output was as visible as possible. To begin with, I had to train in using the CMS, and completing a survey of existing pages. Updating the research pages then involved liaising with academics for material, sourcing images, designing webpages and figuring out how best to present the material.

Once I had some experience with the CMS, I was able to take on more varied work too. I liaised with the Web Marketing Officer and assisted her on several web projects. I also started to learn more about other systems such as the College database, ELE and WordPress and to assist others in my team.

What would you say was your biggest achievement over the course of your internship?

I’ve learnt much more about programming and websites than I thought I would be able to take in when I first started. My biggest achievement was probably completing my first WordPress website using my new CSS skills.

What benefits did your internship bring to your employer?

As my skillset widened, I was able to assist other members of my team in a variety of areas, spreading the workload and freeing them up to work on more specialist tasks.

Did you encounter any problems during the course of your internship and if so, how did you overcome them?

I think you will always come across problems when working through a project. Ideas develop and change as things progress. Some are big problems and some are just temporary setbacks that need to be worked out. As things move on, your idea of the project or what was possible to achieve with our systems might change. When this happened, I needed to liaise closely with different teams to make sure that everyone involved agreed on what outcome we wanted to achieve, and everyone was happy with it.