Well this week turned out to be the most exciting one yet: I got hired!!
Officially starting on May 10th, I will continue on as a Product Design Intern for the next 3 months where I will be working on a single project with a new team! I don’t know which project it is yet but I’m both equally excited and nervous to begin!
Since starting my practicum here at Metalab, I knew this is where I would like to be– even if not right after school, I would’ve definitely worked my way around to try again. While this place was number one choice out of my list of options for practicum, I was sliiiightly worried it would feel too big and busy because it’s already a pretty big company and it continues to grow in size but I’m so glad it didn’t turn out that way. While it is a big company, projects and teams are managed well enough that it doesn’t feel overwhelming and members are supportive. Even onboarding has been pretty fun! Every couple of weeks, there is an event for all the designers (although anyone else is welcomed too) called Global Design Share and it’s super interesting to watch because either one or two teams will present their work to everyone else. Depending on which phase they’re on, they present what they have so far, what the goal of the project is, what the client is like, what their next steps are, etc. It’s a great way to see what your fellow team mates are working on and you might learn something new that can be implemented on your current project. During these shares, the host will also make announcements and it was during this call that they announced my internship which was super sweet! I had to answer a couple of questions like describing my time here so far, which projects I’ve been working on and what was the most surprising thing I’ve learned (a bit more on this later). It felt really great being highlighted in this way and during the week I continued to get welcoming messages from other Metalab members.
As for the most surprising thing I’ve learned so far… I would say learning about collaborating as a team. For a single project, there’ll be a good number of people involved: a producer who is basically the team manager, a client partner (deals directly with a client with any concerns, questions, etc), a design director (overlooks the whole design team, can make final calls), a design lead (leads the design team, works directly with designers), a couple of product designers and usually one or two researchers. I never really thought about how teams were organized or what that would look like (or even how many people were actually involved) so coming here really opened my eyes about workflow in general. At Capilano, we basically filled in these roles ourselves and I really appreciate it now because coming in with some background knowledge (such as research) has helped with the whole onboarding process (perhaps even helped remove some of that overwhelmingness I was worried about before!).
Anyways, I’m over-the-moon happy about the way things have fallen into place. I only have 3 days left now and I’m looking forward to what my last (for a while) week looks like 🙂