SERIES / MY ATLASSIAN INTERNSHIP
A (not-so-ordinary) day in the life of an intern
What does an intern do? What’s it like to work from home? What does a content designer do? I try to answer some of these questions in today’s blog.
“What does a typical day in your role look like?” I remember asking the hiring manager in my interview. It’s not a unique question, that’s for sure, but it’s often the one at the top of a job applicant’s mind because wouldn’t you want to know what you’d actually be doing if offered this role?
I imagine students and recent graduates are especially curious. After all, for most of us, we’ll be navigating our first career steps, looking forward to full-time employment for the first time yet not quite knowing what that really entails.
I’ve been at Atlassian for a little over two months now and I feel like I’ve settled into some sort of rhythm that I’m going to try to capture in a day-in-the-life post. However, as I’ve come to realise, content designers work relatively independently, which actually means my “typical” working day would be fairly uninteresting to describe. So with that in mind, I picked a slightly busier — and therefore more interesting, I hope — day to document. Enjoy!
Any opinions expressed are my own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Atlassian.
On a cool and cloudy Wednesday in January…
7:30 a.m. I dismiss my first alarm.
7:45 a.m. I dismiss my second alarm.
8:08 a.m. I jolt out of bed having suddenly remembered I have a car service appointment at 9 a.m. Moment of panic is followed by a sigh of relief — I can still make it.
8:27 a.m. Decision: eat breakfast quickly and get to service centre just in time, or skip breakfast and get to service centre with time to spare? I choose the second option because I’ll be back soon, right? (I was wrong, but I didn’t know that yet.)
8:44 a.m. Check-in to the service centre as per COVID-19 protocol. I opted to wait at the centre while the service was being done. Two hours? No problem, I can wait, I was planning to do my work anyway…on the laptop I forgot to bring. UGH!
9:00 a.m. I call into my first meeting of the day, a fortnightly content design sparring session. This is a Trans-Pacific friendly session, so most folks are joining from Sydney and the U.S. There’s still a lot of people I haven’t met, but I say hi nevertheless. There is only one item on the agenda, and we spend some time suggesting and discussing options for naming a “default” tab in one of our software products. Should we use “Primary”? No, primary suggests there’s a hierarchy which isn’t always the case. How about “Main”? Eh, still carries a sense of hierarchy, though potentially to a lesser extent. “Master”? Definitely not, we are moving away from master/slave terminology. And the discussion goes on.
9:30 a.m. I try to log in to Slack, but I’m unsuccessful since I’m not connected to the company VPN. UGH. Time passes.
11:00 a.m. There’s a talk today being delivered by content strategy expert Meghan Casey, as part of a wider (internal) Research & Insights Talks series. I’m excited about this talk as it’s right up my content alley. Meghan walks us through a three-pronged approach to measuring content effectiveness, and I’m left feeling a renewed sense of appreciation for the importance of creating and managing good content. I also don’t have my notebook on me, so I resort to frantically typing my takeaways into the Notes app on my phone.
11:40 a.m. Not happy. It’s been almost three hours since I brought my car in for a regular service and it’s still not done. I’m told something needs to be replaced, but about half an hour later I’m told it’ll have to wait ’til next time as they don’t have the part today.
12:20 p.m. The printer at the service centre jams as it’s trying to print my invoice. Nice. Of course it does.
12:38 p.m. I’m finally home and — as I rarely start the day without breakfast — I’m very, very hungry. I microwave some dumplings and sit down at my desk, quickly flicking through Slack and my unread team channels. I haven’t missed anything urgent, phew.
1:00 p.m. There’s an hour until our weekly team meeting where I’ll be presenting what I’ve been up to this month, so I put my head down and spend the hour tidying up my spreadsheets and working document and figuring out what the key insights I want to highlight are.
1:58 p.m. I announce to the rest of the house that I have a meeting now. #justWFHthings
2:00 p.m. Presentation time! For the past three weeks, I’ve been conducting a content audit of our help documentation (within the scope of cloud migration) and coming up with recommendations to better support the creation and organisation of these docs in the future, especially given cloud adoption has recently become a number one priority for the company. No pressure at all (no really, it’s quite exciting actually).
2:37 p.m. My presentation happens to be the only item on the agenda today, so we get a short break until our weekly team sparring session.
3:00 p.m. Sparring time. A few teammates bring pieces of what they’ve been working on to invite feedback from the rest of the team. I really enjoy sparring sessions because I’ve found it’s one of the best ways for me to learn to think like a designer, as I listen to the questions and feedback that other designers ask and give each other. If nothing else, it’s also an opportunity for me to familiarise with the rest of our products through the features people are working on. What is the default selection here? Why is this the default? Should options even be preselected? Why not? How should the selections be ordered on this page?
3:35 p.m. Yay, another meeting finishes early! Normally I’ll be logging off for the day around now as I’ve found it hard to regain my focus after back-to-back meetings in the afternoon, but today I feel like I need to compensate for some lost hours in the morning. But before that, I need more food. I microwave another bowl of dumplings, and decide yes I would also like some green olives to snack on.
3:50 p.m. I start with rewriting my notes from this morning’s meetings into my notebook. Then I catch up on the rest of the Slack channels I didn’t get around to earlier. There’s a conversation happening in one of the social channels about the ignorant attitudes toward women in tech, and what a “typical” engineer apparently looks like (no points for guessing that the engineer stereotype is not female). Fortunately, I work at an incredibly diverse and inclusive company with people who are more than ready to challenge the status quo and advocate for women in STEM.
4:30 p.m. I do some reading about structuring content at Atlassian that a senior technical writer has recently written. I learn about a new concept: intelligent content. It’s a fascinating piece, though a lot for me to process, and I’ve made a mental note to revisit this write-up.
4:45 p.m. After realising last week that I’ve only got three weeks left at this internship, I made a note to self to make the most of the resources I have access to. I book myself in to a few self-paced courses that cover content design skills.
5:11 p.m. I’ve jumped back into my own work, which involves drafting revisions of a few help articles to improve their quality and readability. There’s a few changes I’d like to get input from another content designer for, so I share my draft with them for feedback.
6:20 p.m. My stomach tells me it’s time for dinner so I start to wrap up, scribbling a few reminders in my notebook about where I should pick up from tomorrow. I close a couple tabs, check Slack one more time, and finally I can call it a day.
As always, thanks for reading! You can read the next blog in this series here 👈🏼
