My very first day of work in my chosen profession began about two and a half hours late.
I am a bit of a worrier, so naturally, the night before my first day as a graphic design intern at Plus11 was filled with nervous excitement and a quite a bit of restlessness. How would I succeed? What would I struggle with? Was my boss more of a Steve Carrell in The Office or a Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada? Such questions were keeping me awake, and the fact that I had to be in at 7:00 AM weighed heavily on me.
If there’s anything I love more than fonts, it’s sleeping.
So I took a sleeping pill I’d had prescribed to me for such instances; this was the critical mistake that would lead me to one of the most embarrassing blunders I’ve committed in my 20-year-old life. The medication was a little too potent, knocking me out so cleanly that I didn’t hear my alarm screaming at me in the morning. I didn’t wake up at 6:00 like I intended to. I didn’t even wake up at 7:00. No, dear reader, I did not awake from my slumber until 9:21 AM.
I was almost 100% sure I was going to be fired. Luckily, the people I work with and for are very kind and forgiving, and since then I’ve made it a point to be here on time and work hard to redeem myself.
Me getting hired as an intern at Plus11 is the coolest thing that has ever happened to everyone that works here. I am an absolutely hilarious, talented, and all-around lovely individual, and most of my teachers have told my parents that I am “a pleasure to have in class” (my 11th-grade French teacher and I had some beef, mais eh bien, c’est la vie.) So yeah, good choice guys! *hair flip*
In all seriousness, though, I have loved my time interning here. It has been an absolute pleasure and a privilege to work for what I think is one of the coolest tech companies in Utah county. I’ve been here for one month as of today, and every day since I started has been an incredible opportunity for me to learn valuable design and teamwork skills. In the short time I’ve been at Plus11, I feel more prepared for a professional design career than I ever felt in a class. My sense of aesthetics has improved and my ability to design simply and effectively increases every time I work on something new.
Right now, I’m working on designing an emoji kit for one of our apps, which has been a total dream for me. I get to use my drawing and design skills that I already had, but I am developing my abilities in Illustrator to produce quality images (that are also super duper cute, to boot!)
All in all, I’ve had the time of my life here, and I love to talk about and brag about my job to anyone that will listen. My poor friends have heard about nothing but Catastic, one of our apps, for the past four weeks – I guess they’d better get used to it because I’m hoping to stick around for a minute or two!
