Listen to Selena (2021) talk about her internship in graphic design at Pew Research Center this past summer.

Stephanie: You're listening to Gear Up, the Duke Career Center's student produce a podcast showcasing real student summer internship experiences. My name's Stephanie. And today I'm talking to Selena, who worked in graphic design at Pew Research this summer.

Selena: Hi, I'm Selena. I'm a junior currently at Duke and I'm doing a interdepartmental major in visual media studies and computer science.

Stephanie: And where did you work this past summer?

Selena: I worked at Pew Research Center.

Stephanie: What were you doing specifically? What was your your role?

Selena: Yeah, I was the official title was Digital Design Intern. So basically I was working on their graphic design team, making all kinds of data visualizations and other types of visuals to go along with their articles and reports and be published online.

Stephanie: How did you find out about that position?

Selena: I don't remember exactly, but I think I was either looking on LinkedIn or Google or something and looking for a variety of different design related jobs. And it popped up. And I knew about the center previously because I because I'm in journalism and I do do some work for the Chronicle here. And at my high school newspaper, we used Pew Research Center's statistics a lot. And so when I saw that they had internships, I was really excited about that. And so I applied.

Stephanie: And you got it. That's cool. So what kind of stuff were you actually doing day to day? Were you working on projects mostly or...

Selena: I basically was functioning like a full time staff member. And depending on what was being published that day, I was either working on social media graphics or I was working on graphics to accompany a report or they have blog posts that are called for their facthink blog. And so those all need those, all need data visualization graphics as well as everything that gets published gets a featured image. So I was also looking through stock photos, getting images and that kind of thing for photos to go along with the reports. I would say I had a few larger projects, I worked on. I worked on I was on a trusted science report and that report was over 60 pages long. Most of them were actually done by the researchers because they had they have like a template that they used to make some of the simpler graphics, but then for the more complicated ones, they go to the design team. And so I was working on some of those and working on another report about machine learning. That was pretty interesting. I got to learn a lot from the researchers about what they were working on and that was really cool.

Stephanie: So do you kind of have to read the like the reports to know what graphics you need?

Selena: Yeah, I definitely had to read through the reports for context. I think a lot of times the researchers already kind of knew we want to show this or we want to show this particular trend in a graphic. But sometimes there were times, especially when I was looking for featured images or trying to create featured images, that was a time where I needed to read through and figure out what's the gist of the report or the post.

Stephanie: And so did you find it interesting? Was it cool getting to do that?

Selena: Yeah, it's definitely really cool. I think it was especially interesting for me in learning more about how the whole process works, because you see that the center publishes so much information and so much content. And it was really cool to get to see how that happens.

Stephanie: Was there anything that you kind of weren't expecting before you came to this position like. Did it kind of match the expectations of what you thought you would be doing day-to-day?

Selena: As far as expectations. Well, I expected that I was going to be working on graphics and doing that kind of thing. I thought I didn't know that I would be looking for photos