Over the summer, and throughout the fall 2017- spring 2018 school year, I interned with the Kansas Water Office, as a graphic design intern. I found out about this internship through the Agricultural Communications List-Server, and applied by sending my resume and cover letter to my now supervisor. I would recommend this internship to anyone interested in design, video projects, and social media work.
While I worked on a variety of projects, my “day-to-day” design work is creating graphics for KWO’s social media, mainly Facebook and Twitter. This ranged from looking at the national calendar and seeing if any upcoming national days could relate to water, to looking through KWO’s previous projects and creating social media graphic templates to showcase these projects. Along with building the graphics, I also had to develop wording for posts and decide the best hash tags and people to tag in order to gain more interaction with each post.
My biggest projects over summer were to develop a universal template design for various fact sheets. The water office wanted to move to a more professional look, which meant giving their various sheets a cohesive look. Since it is a government agency, fact sheets are handed out to legislators, lobbyist, senators, etc., having a further developed brand and design makes our sheets more recognizable, which was an exciting part of my position, and knowing that my work was making a difference.
I was also lucky to be able to travel around Kansas this summer taking pictures and videos of different lakes and reservoirs around the state to create factual videos about them. This was something I proposed to my boss, which ended up being very successful. It was definitely a learning experience, since I do not have very much photography experience, I was able to expand my portfolio and learn more about photography and videography through this project.
The work I have done during my tine at KWO has greatly increased applicable work for my portfolio. My supervisor was great about working with me to develop projects that suited my interest, and talents. I felt that since I was able to mold my experience with them, I was able to build on to what I want to do with my career.