LINK description
Link is an three week long internship experience required of all Animas High School Juniors. Students are required to contact an local or external business and apply for an one month internship to learn about the relevant industry. This is designed to encourage students to learn about the industries they may want to work in later in life.
My Link Internship
My internship was at an local company that provides high quality food boards to the Durango Area called Farm to Fingers. Farm to Fingers was started at the beginning of the Covid Pandemic to provide high quality consumables at order. Farm to Fingers uses locally and ethically sourced ingredients in all of their products. Farm to Fingers is run and operated online exclusively for delivery orders at request.
Farm to Fingers Website
Website Link: farmtofingersgrazing.com
My Project
My project for this internship was to design an custom product for sale on the Farm to Fingers Website, I designed an multitude of cookies boxes using locally sourced ingredients for sale. The cookie boxes would be sold for 15 dollars each and are designed to feed four people over multiple days. It was my hope with this project that I could provide an marketable product for actual sale, as opposed to just an random prototype that would never see the capitalist light of day. I still hope that with the grace of Allah such an ambition will come to fruition, and my work might be consumed by the masses of the Durango area.
Starting Skills
When I first came into my LINK internship I had a plethora of relevant skills in graphic design using programs such as Canva and Photoshop. I had no real experience however with designing marketing materials beyond some previous work with designing a logo for a University in Nigeria. It also had an extensive track record with cooking and baking goods which of course came into use during the production of my final product as it was entirely reliant on my baking skills. Beyond my abilities regarding design and production of recipes and plans for products in the consumable industry I was lacking any real experience with designing a product for sale and consumption. As a final note I would say that I am blessed to have an inherently good ability to guess what will end up being good to eat, and how to make it without having a specific recipe to follow, and while I followed recipes in my designs for my products I did alter the recipes quite a bit in the interest of including more natural ingredients.
Skills Developed
During the duration of this internship I developed my skills in graphic design and planning of promotional materials. Using the Canva program, I was able to further develop my ability to produce a high quality design for marketing purposes, after the work I did for Farm to Fingers on designing logos for products and internal materials. I also developed my skills on using unique fonts to produce a more professional product, with better original tang and professional backdrop integration. In addition to my practical experience on digital design, I learned how to better design and produce product recipes for mass production and distribution. I hope therefore that designs that I might produce in the future either physical or digital can be better planned and more professionally produced by myself into a high quality product in the multitude of industries of potential application.
Challenges Faced
One of the biggest challenges that I encountered during LINK was the lack of work my mentor provided me, resulting in me finishing my daily work in a few hours. This was a huge problem as my internship required an absolute minimum of 90 hours in order to be counted in my favor. I rectified this by directly asking for more work from my mentor and also slowing down my work process to favor quality over quantity and speed. I also began doing something that I rarely do in revising and refining my work instead of just improving it and cleaning it up as I go. This applied itself to slowing down the work process and keeping me up in hours. It also improved the quality of my work as I went back over it multiple times to ensure the highest possible quality for the final product. The only other issue I faced was the fact that my schedule did not match up with the other people in the company and I had to miss several meetings for this reason.
My Importance
I would say that as an Intern, while degrading in terms of time to my mentor, that I provided passable graphic design skills to the team and produced several useful materials that could be employed by the company to promote its existing products, while I am not aware of the skills that the company might already possess in terms of graphic design, I believe that my work was somewhat useful in expanding the marketing portfolio of the company relative to its existing materials. However, considering the time and effort expended by the mentor at the company it is hard to say if the mentor gained from our interning experience or suffered an net loss considering the time it takes to replicate my works from an experienced perspective. Thus I would say that I have no real argument for nor against the hiring of future interns for the company considering the difficulties we imposed on our mentor the first time.
LINK Internship
My Experience in the Future
This internship has really helped me by giving me another thing to add to my resume and improving my skills in marketing. While I certainly do not want to do anything in the future even relating to the food industry due to the fact that I hate it with an unmatched rage of sheer white hot flames. However it was a tolerable passage of time for an internship and I feel that I could have done far worse in terms of how I spent my time.
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