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My internship ends in 3 weeks.

It’s a weird realization to come to. Have I really been here for 9 weeks? It definitely doesn’t feel that way—I still get a little lost if my meeting is in Volta, I only hooked up my dual monitor setup last Wednesday (even though I’ve had the 2 Thunderbolt displays since day 1, yikes), and I had breakfast in the cafe for the first time just this morning. I still don’t feel like I have it all together, even though I probably should at this point.

Still, it’s pretty hard to actually forget how close I am to finishing my internship. My calendar’s been reminding me that my submission to the Intern Expo is due in only a few days. The Adobe Design program manager’s been sending out tech rehearsal invites to all the interns, so we can practice presenting before we do it in front of the entire design org (oh boy!). My small talk with my team members has gone from chatting about future projects to “When is your internship ending?” and “Here’s what I think we’ll be able to finish before you leave…” My workdays are less furious-hustle-and-bustle and more about refining the small details, or taking on tiny side projects.

In these windows of extra time I’ve come across, I’ve been thinking a lot about how my internship’s gone. Sure, I’ve learned so much about UX, how to work with a cross-disciplinary team, so on and so forth, but I’ve been thinking about more than that: have I been fast enough? Have I been friendly enough? Have I been creative enough? Have I done enough?

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Photo by picjumbo.com from Pexels

 

Today the design I’d been working on for weeks got ripped apart—and that’s okay.

“Never get too attached to your work” is something I hear a lot in design. It’s also something that’s never been that hard for me to do, so much so that I’ve almost brushed it off every time. By nature I’ve always made huge batches of designs, different versions of the same feature that I can narrow down later with rested eyes or a good ol’ design review. That way I’m not attached to any one design. At the core of my work, I’m designing for the user, not me, so there’s no point in taking it personally if some of the designs don’t make the mark.

But today, as I sat in the dim lighting of Volta, for the first time in the past eight weeks, the critique stung. Maybe it was because of the 2 new designers in the room, who’d never seen my work before. Maybe it was the post-lunch sleepiness. Maybe it was the fact that I’d been working on these features—the hardest ones I’d ever faced on this project—for so long, wracking my head days after days to figure out the best functionality and the best layout, and how on earth was I going to come up with another design? Maybe it was the knowledge that I only had three weeks to finish, and I was nowhere close to where I wanted to be. Maybe it was all those things combined.

For a second, I blinked away tears as my manager added to the ever expanding to-do list sprawled over the whiteboard. “You don’t want to be that girl who cries at work” repeated over and over in my head, like a mantra. By the time he turned back around, my eyes were already dry (I think).

“Cool.” I smiled and nodded.

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“Paper Cut Out Light Bulbs” created by Freepik

 

A few weeks ago, Adobe Design held their quarterly company-wide show and tell: an hour just for anyone to present their passion projects outside of work. The agenda was pretty interesting but—it was during my precious lunch time. Thanks, time zones.

That morning I’d asked my manager whether it was worth going to. “It can be pretty cool,” he told me. “Oh, but I’m not going though. It’s during lunch!”

Still, not wanting to risk looking like anything but a gungho intern, I (and my stomach) grumbled internally all the way down to the 1st floor Da Vinci room, where a whopping 1 person was sitting in the medium sized room. I saw him through the glass door and squinted at the room sign. Da Vinci. I looked at him again. He smiled. I checked the room sign again. Yep, still Da Vinci. And that’s how I found myself waiting in the meeting room for the most awkward 5 minutes while we both tried to not make eye contact.

As you can imagine, by the time the meeting started, my expectations of it were very, very low, while my expectations of lunch were growing very, very high.

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“Pixelated Heart Shape” by rawpixel.com

 

“So you’re a comp sci major, right? Why are you going into UX design?”

The question almost echoed in the dead silence of the Newton meeting room. The developer who asked it stared at me, smiling, expecting.

I stared back, smiling. Frozen.

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“Paper Elements” by Dina Belenko is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

 

Being an intern on the Analytics team means I should have some understanding of analytics. Being a user experience design intern on the Analytics team means, in an ideal world, I should have as much of an understanding of analytics as possible. “That makes sense,” you might be thinking. “A designer can’t possibly create the best experience for a product without having any idea how it works, right?”

[insert nervous laughter here]

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First lunch @ Taqueria 27.

 

Ricotta dumplings. French dip sandwich. Angus carne asada tacos. Shoyu ramen. Avocado garden burger. Almond croissants.

Lunch has always been a sacred time for me. I love food. If you follow me on insta, you know I’m always hunting for the city’s finest om noms. When it comes to eating, there’s only one right thing to do in my book: set aside pure, wholesome time just to appreciate it. No homework, no stress. Just me and the food. Finals, who?

On my first day of work, my manager took me out for lunch. Taqueria 27. It was loud and packed with people rushing in for a quick lunch before clocking back in. My mentor and the senior design manager debated over how many flavors of syrup were offered for the sparkling water. My manager assured me I wasn’t being tested over lunch, just on how many ambiguous pop culture references I could make, while I nervously laughed and hoped I wasn’t about to spill guacamole all over myself.

In short: this was not sacred lunchtime.

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“Question mark” by Marco Bellucci is licensed under CC BY 2.0

 

“Well…” She paused. Two slow blinks. “This is a good start!”

‘Start’? I thought I was done. Welcome to the afternoon of day 3 of the internship, where my hopes and dreams of being the best new hire ever were dashed to pieces in the span of 30 seconds.

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