Dept. of Chemical Engineering Design Internship

My STEP Signature Project was a Design Internship through the Department of Chemical Engineering at Ohio State. I took on the role of being the graphic designer for the Koffolt News and Annual Report released by the Department each year. For both of these publications, I was in charge of creating the spread designs. laying out each story and communicating with my boss throughout the design process.

While completing my STEP Signature Project I started to understand what I liked and didn’t like doing in terms of design projects and the overall design process. I found out that although I like creating layouts for magazines and reports that it is not something that I want to do as a profession. The part that I enjoyed most in creating these works was making sure the story was easy to follow and read as the user. This made me realize that I like creating experiences for users more than just making a spread look nice. With this realization, I started to look into other design professions like user-experience design and fell in love with it.

In addition to creating magazine spreads, I was able to work on actual illustration and graphic creation by using the Adobe Creative Cloud. Throughout my internship duration, I noticed a transformation of my design skills using products such as Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign, and Adobe Photoshop. I now can navigate and use these products much faster than I could previously to this internship.

During my STEP Signature Project, COVID-19 caused my internship to be done completely online and at home. This presented its own challenges such as staying motivated and not being distracted by my surroundings. I was able to get through these challenges by making my desk at home more comfortable, setting task lists each day to complete, and putting my phone somewhere not near me during my shifts. Although having this internship online was difficult it taught me how to work from home and improved my online communication skills.

With this, I realized that I could have a full-time job that was completely virtual and now know what that experience will look like. I will be looking for jobs starting this spring and most of them will be partially remote, especially during this time. After experiencing this internship virtually while completing classes at the same time my time management skills also dramatically improved. I had never really used Google Calendar until this summer/fall, but it helped me manage my time in all aspects of my life including my internship, working out, going to online class, and getting my assignments in on time.

After completing my STEP Signature Project internship, I was able to realize the path that I want to go down after graduation, learned how to work completely online, and improved my overall design and communication skills. This internship experience not only improved and taught skills, but it also taught me how things can change in the blink of an eye, and how to make the most out of every situation.

Spread created on InDesign

At home workspace