My Grey World

Apart from forcing myself to wake up soooooo early everyday and a quite long bus journey everyday (after dressing up and putting on make up in a hurry or sometimes running across the street to chase the bus), it’s quite fun.

And quite surprising. You know in SIS we’re taught how to improve business with IT blah blah blah and the stuff. So far I’ve learned about programming, some security stuff, some process modelling stuff, and some data management stuff. And what I’m doing here.. It’s not “nothing like that”. It’s.. Connected somehow, but was never taught.

But I guess that’s the point of SMU boasting about “Learning-to-Learn skill”. More like “Research it yourself or your project’s gonna suck skill” actually.

Neeways. So, what am I doing in this internship?

I’m designing website.
More like webpages actually.

So if the company has something new, I’m the one to design the webpage to announce the happy news and put it onto the main enterprise intranet website. I’m also told to redesign the company’s internal department website.

So, anything about what I’ve learnt? Nah..
But I learn a lot of new things. I’ve never really learnt CSS even though I have rough understanding of it, but in this internship I learnt a lot of playing with it. I learnt more about image editing using Photoshop and GIMP (coz my laptop doesn’t have Photoshop and they never bought more licenses) coz I was told to design some banners and stuff to make the webpage looks more interesting. I learnt about usability and stuff. Smashing Magazine is one powerful resource, I tell you.
So this is still considered an IS internship right? Right? I don’t want to search painstakingly for another internship next summer. *slaps forehead*

Oh ya, btw, if you don’t know about how I got my internship.. I’m gonna tell you.

So one fine day I got 2 missed calls from a friend E, who was my groupmate in some project a year ago. Or was it 2 years ago. Never mind. I sms-ed him, asking why he called me. He answered that there was an internship opportunity, but by that time it had already been taken. Ok, I thought. I didn’t really want to do internship anyway. I wanted to go back to Jakarta and relax after my Europe trip.

The next day, when I was still sleeping…
“Beep! Rrrr.. Rrrr.. Rrrrrr..” (my phone was set to beep+vibrate mode)
“Hallo?” (with hoarse voice)
“Oey, Sylvia arh?” it was E.
“Ya, why?”
“Eh, do you still want the internship? The position is free again.”
“Huh?”
“Ya, you want it or not?”
“Can I think about it first?”
“Okay la, but must be fast hor. I think it’s quite urgent on C’s side” (apparently he’s offering me the opportunity after his friend C – also my friend- wanted to let go the position for some reasons)
“Ya ya”

And so after consulting friends and everything, E sms-ed me again, asking. I asked one final question “Should I?” to my boyfriend and I sent the sms “Okay, I want it ”.

Sent the resume, arranged for interview, came for interview, and ta-da! I got the internship.

If it sounded so easy, it was.

My primary reason for finally deciding to take the internship and sacrificing my good sleep was that.. It’s not really easy to get IS internship in SMU. You see, SMU is made up of primarily business students so naturally companies are more inclined to get business interns (marketing, finance, operations, etc.). I doubt some companies know that SMU has SIS. But anyway, usually when an IS internship is posted up, it’s either snatched up by some other guy (who might have more awesome programming skillZ than yooZ) or no one applies since it’s so sucky (usually heavy programming with small pay). Erm, hello, we’re not taught to be programmers okay. Haha. So to “cut the queue”, I decided to take this internship offer. And it was actually posted on OnTrac (the lame job portal of SMU. If you have a company you can go there and sign up to recruit interns). So I don’t need many bureaucracy that I had to do if I source my internship by myself (get approval from company+school, register the company with school, blah blah blah). Just submit some form and I was ready to go.

And soooo there was the story. =D
I’m signing off to go for a dinner with my boyfriend. It’s my 7th monthversary today! =D

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