Prelude Interactive

Internships. The only way to get a job out of college. Résumé builders.

Sometime in December, I was attentively sitting in PR 305 anxiously waiting for class to begin when in walks a guest speaker—score! No class today. Perfect time to stream the soccer game to my laptop—who claimed he worked for the American Cancer Society. I instantly connected with him as a son whose mother was affected by cancer, but nonetheless, I had to look him up on the social media networks in order to verify his existence and credibility. As my bandwidth was fading, I am only allocated so much bandwidth per week, I decided I might as well pay attention to our speaker, just this once though, since guest speakers don’t happen all that often, that is unless your teacher decides to take a two week hiatus. After going through the motions of a lecture to a bunch of undergrads in an intro class, I approached him after class and struck up a conversation.

Let’s explore my expectations prior to jumping on board: Initially, I had no expectations or anything what-so-ever, I was excited to try my hand in the workforce and learn new information; but after learning that Prelude focused on technology, I was more excited than before as I have a passion for technology. After meeting with Ehren Fross on multiple occasions, it became clear that our partnership would work and could be prosperous. I had never tried my hand at anything more than rudimentary HTML and a nervous shockwave hit when more complicated languages were being explored during our conversations. The shockwave reverberated through me as the conversations delved deeper into Salesforce and other applications I had barely even heard of.  Not to confuse you, but while these discussions were frightening, it wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle or Ehren couldn’t teach/guide me.

Fast forward and here I am: Three months into my internship and I couldn’t be happier with my decision to move forward with the internship opportunity. Flexible hours, good pay, and priceless experience.

My first project included writing documentation on the Salesforce application Survey Builder. Writing documentation requires more time than I expected, not for the actual writing part, but to become familiar with the tool one is writing about. This project allowed me to try my hand at technical writing, which did not come as easily as I expected. My tendencies (writing to the audience, not getting to the point quick enough, et cetera) in writing proved detrimental to technical writing. However, after many revisions and meetings, the final copy worked. Not only did this writing bit help me become a better and more versatile writer, it opened my eyes to an entirely new field: technical writing.

Researching volunteer management systems became the next big task. In hopes of publishing the data and finding commonalities amongst the different systems, I compiled all of the research I could find into a spreadsheet. This process took longer than I expected largely because many companies would not post information on their websites, a frustration nonetheless. With the spreadsheet completed, I was tasked to create a website to access the database. While I had dabbled a bit in HTML and Dreamweaver, I had virtually no experience with PHP.  I immediately felt a steep learning curve as it became difficult to grasp the PHP concepts (I should note that I had some experience with Java, but nothing major). This website is still in it’s infant stage, but should be completed soon.

No classroom could have taught me the things I have learned with my tenure at Prelude: teamwork, real world technical writing, deadlines (while I must admit I was the Editor in Chief of a yearbook and am familiar with deadlines, the deadlines I deal with at Prelude are in the real world—the yearbook was as close as a school can prepare you for the real world), meetings, learning new things, expectations, and complications.  If I had to recommend an internship, it would be this one right here: flexible hours, great pay, great business, great guy, great work, and great industry.

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