Internship Opportunity

For a long time I've thought I had little chance of landing some kind of internship in my field of choice so that I could gain a little bit of experience before graduating. It's always seemed like I settled on my choice of occupation a little late in the game and needed to focus more on learning how to actually do it to begin with, and that I didn't really have time to get some real-life experience prior to jumping into the job market.

However, that all changed yesterday when I took a little jaunt over to the Museum of Art here at BYU to talk to Herman Du Toit about a Technology Internship that is available. Russell pointed me towards this one by giving me the flyer in class on Monday and after thinking about it I decided it was at least worth going to talk to the folks at the museum. I took the flyer with me and went over in the gap between my classes.

As it turns out, they are pretty desparate over at the museum and in all honesty could probably use about 10 interns to all work on the same set of projects. Apparently they are severely lacking in help that knows that it is doing, and have just sort of been using band-aids of stuff to keep things operational as best they could.

So, I had a nice chat with Herman Du Toit about what the museum was hoping to do in the future with catching up to the technology available, how their database is ancient, that they need to design an entire museum website from scratch, that they have no workers, etc. I had the chance to tell him that I'm pretty proficient with HTML, CSS, and overall website organization and that I'm currently finishing a class on PHP, AJAX, mySQL, and other random things. His eyes lit up as I went down the list of different features that I thought I could build into a website with a little time to work and such.

Eventually he took me upstairs to meet another guy, Chris Wilson, who I think is the man in charge of the technology aspect of the museum, and we sat down to continue our discussion. Chris asked me a few more things about what types of things I knew how to do, what I'd be willing to learn, and what I wanted to do in the future.

Things wrapped up after a bit and they told me to finish off the application, bring it back, and they'd get back to me within a week after that. The overall impression I got from Herman was that the internship is basically mine for the taking if I want to, and he even offered the idea that I could do the internship next semester and then translate that into a paying job for the summer after school is over. That was sort of cool too.

So, anyways, I guess we'll see where all of this goes, and if it can be helpful to me in the future. I do need to figure out the basics of Flash before January if I do get the internship, and I need to look into some content management software known as Typo, which I've never heard of before, so that could be interesting.