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began my intern project with a very exhaustive and educational interview
with Cisco Systems; they were extremely thorough and professional
in their approach to employing even a temporary intern. The interview
process itself with Cisco became a valuable learning curve for me
and good practice for future interviews.
The
next step, having been offered the internship at Cisco, was to decide
on a series of objectives relevant to that working environment.
The
first objective was to gain a working knowledge of how a large corporation
operates and services an intranet system. Having been self-employed
for many years, I felt that if I were to be employed by a large
company, this would be valuable experience should I ultimately feel
this was the direction I wanted to pursue. This internship provided
the answers and much more, bringing me up to date with how large
corporations use electronic communications in place of traditional
paper manuals and making available incredible amounts of reference
materials for thousands of employees worldwide. This of course is
all instantly available for them on-line.
The
second objective involved learning how to tele-commute internationally
and this has been on-going practice for twelve weeks, involving
conference calling and communicating information via email continually
to colleagues in Sweden, Petaluma and San Jose.
The
third objective was to consolidate my HTML and Dreamweaver skills
and this was achieved by doing web updates in Dreamweaver involving
content updates, style sheet and general HTML formatting updates.
An integral part of this is dealing with the file structures in
a massive web database on the Cisco server and the protocols and
permissions involved in this. It is very easy to get lost in a 9000
page website!
Due to
pressure of deadlines on a huge re-build of the Optical Cisco website,
there was quite a lot of repetetive work involving checking the site
for bad links and any other problems. On this size of website that
meant many hours work for the whole team.
I was
hoping to take my Flash skills, learned at the SRJC, to the next
level and was pleased I had the opportunity. I completely revised
an animation/banner of a flying
comet for the main Cisco Website header (2.5 inches accross)
and created an advertising
banner to promote the new optical website that the team was
working on from a Powerpoint rough layout done by the Marketing
Department. Finally, my most involved project in Flash was doing
a series of updates and alterations on a product
tutorial which involved many files interlinked and timed to
synchronize with voice-overs: this was by far the most complicated
Flash file I’ve ever been let loose on!
All in
all, the whole internship program has been of supreme importance in
taking me from “virtual web-designing in the classroom”
to “the real world of a web-developer”.
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