Week XII

This twelfth week of my internship marked the completion of my third month of the internship period and the completion of my final class in the degree here, which is - as discussed at length with my fellow interns - cause for some degree of celebration. It is, if for no other reason than this month with class has given me a sense of perspective - I know what I can do when I have a month with totally open capacity (month two) and I know what a month of reduced capacity can mean in terms of how I feel about what I'm getting done.

Looking at what actually got done this week, though, demonstrates probably an accurate microcosm of the difficulty I've had this month in managing both a class and the internship. We didn't necessarily have a lot to do on the NFA project (as it was somewhat of a slack week following the delivery of the prototype), which was good, because most of my week was taken up with presentation preparation, which is both for and not for the internship.

Given that it was the final week of a class, and given that classes often have a project that caps off the curriculum, it should be no surprise that I needed to spend time working on that. I won't digress too far into the details of that, as it is primarily unrelated to the internship, but the content of that project was tangentially focused on the NFA. I spent a lot of time working on this unfortunate, eye-rolling-ly amateurish "trailer" (which I use loosely, given its complete non-relation, content-wise) for the NFA:



I also spent more productive hours preparing my month-three brief on what it was, exactly, that I'd been spending my time on in the internship. It was enjoyable to stand up and lay out exactly what it was I've worked on and learned, and it was nice to be able to list all those things that - in fact - I did garner from my time here.

I know that I'm looking forward to the next (and final) two months of this internship, as I start to move forward with a continually-refined direction for the NFA and to move forward with some of the new interns we're bringing on.