Evaluate Your Objectives

By: Heidi Pettis
Program: Work Experience Internship
Teacher: Linda Hemmenway
Date: November 23, 2002


This semester I participated in the Work Experience Intern program at the JC. I have been at my job since the beginning of Summer, but this is my first time in the internship program. It made the whole experience of going to work quite different because suddenly I had goals and a time frame to work with. My goals or objectives were based on things that both needed to get done, and would be beneficial to me. Some of my goals worked much better than others, and I think if I were to take this class next semester, I'd have a much better idea of what direction I would go with my objectives.

What were my goals and objectives? What worked and what didn't? What would make them better? These are questions I will be answering for you in the next paragraphs. Knowing the answers to these questions would have made it much easier to choose good objectives for this class, and for work in general.

My objectives were mostly chosen by my supervisor, Cindy Jenkins. I came up with a couple ideas that she built into objectives, and the others were her idea entirely. She had a list of objectives that her interns usually used, but that wouldn't work for me because I had already completed most of the things on the list. We decided to go with these 5 goals: Create a flash navigation system using actionscripting, create a flash office tour, create the back-end for 5 websites, implement advanced search engine optimization techniques for 5 websites, and spend 70 hours in photoshop.

The objective that involved creating back-ends was a success, I think, because I ended up doing 8 or 9 of them instead of the chosen 5. If you end up doing twice the work that was assigned to you, people either really like what you're doing, or else it's a really boring task and they don't like you. Back-end work isn't that bad, so I'm going to assume it's the first of the 2 situations. Also the flash objectives, which I blended into one job, worked well. I have done more than just the objective for that site, I've been doing little tasks for the designer all semester and the site is now finally just about finished. The doctor is very happy with it, so it seems to be a success.

While I was working on that flash assignment, I learned how to target frames in a movie clip from outside of the clip. I'd learned this before, but since I never used it for anything, it had been all but forgotten. The objective that taught me the most, though, is the search engine optimization objective. This is because I knew practically nothing about search engine optimization when I started. I learned lots of little things about how search engines rate sites. For example, if you have a page with only 2 words on it, and those words are "Dental Implants", you will likely come up higher in a search result than a site with paragraphs and paragraphs about dental implants that mention the words "Dental Implants" several times. This is because it goes by percentage (which I find a little odd, myself) Also, words that are higher up on a page get more credit than words shoved way down at the bottom somewhere. Search engine optimization sounds like very crazy stuff, and I still have alot to learn.

I did come across one rather large snag in my quest to complete my search engine optimization goal, though. I have done the reading and the learning, but found that there were no sites available to optimize. Shenoa, who taught me about the search engine stuff, told me I could optimize about 5 or so pages on the new PBHS site, instead of 5 sites, because that's all that was available for me to optimize. The new site is still in progress and many pages on it are a bit low on content, so there is a limited number of pages that would be worth optimizing at this point in time. I'm not sure how that's going to go over. My other objectives all went very well.

If I were to improve my objectives, I think I would have kept the search engine optimization objective, because even though I didn't get to complete it as planned, I still learned a lot from that objective, more than from any other. I would get rid of the 70 hours of photoshop. That objective didn't teach me anything. I know how to use photoshop and any amount of time I spend in it isn't going to teach me any more, unless I spend that time getting to know weird filters or something like that. Most of my photoshop work didn't even involve me doing any work, because I made actions for practically everything I did, and then all I had to do was name the files when the save box came up.

Better goals for me would involve more programming. I really don't know the programming stuff that well but that's because I don't use it on a regular basis. I would be slow and would have to look lots of things up, and would probably be frustrated alot, but I would learn more than I would doing anything else. Some good objectives for me would be things like "complete 1 javascript programming job", "make a flash navigational system using actionscript that involves pull-out or drop-down submenus", and "design and create a second-level page from scratch". Also, there is a flash movie that some of the sites have as a footer, sometimes in a separate frame, which plays music and has an on/off button. Every time someone navigates to a new page, the music turns back on. I think fixing that would involve passing a variable to javascript, and then passing it from page to page, and then giving it back to flash on the new page. That would be a good task for someone to do, I'd learn alot from something like that. The problem with doing things I'm not already totally familar with is that I feel like I'm wasting time when I don't know something right away. If I have to stop and look something up I feel like I'm not working because I'm not producing a result. It would be a good task for me for the sake of helping me get over that, as well.

Next semester I will perhaps see about getting some of those goals accomplished. I don't think I'll take the internship class again, but I'm still officially an intern so I should continue to keep goals that will teach me things as well as help the company. One thing I learned about setting goals this semester is the importance of planning out your time. I've done just fine with my objectives at work, but my class activities have been a bit of a problem for me because I didn't plan my time well. I unfortunately chose a date to sit down and work on everything which turned out to be the day after everything was due. This has definitely taught me the value of keeping a calendar. Now I'm going to have to sit through a procrastination seminar. How fitting. Setting goals should be based around setting time limits and managing your progress so that it gets done by that limit. This is one of my more important re-discoveries this semester.

Through Work Experience I have gained self confidence in my abilities. I've gained a few new abilities to add to my list, and learned what areas of my field I still need to work on. Aside from my mistake involving the class activities, I've had a very successful experience and have learned some valuable skills, as well as having some experience to put on my resume.