My internship with the UNCW library began during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. I worked completely from home and communicated with my supervisor weekly over Zoom meetings. For the first month, I only worked and communicated with this individual. This situation, which improved my abilities to work and communicate remotely, was also at the detriment of collaborative work. For this reason, I used the resources I was revising to help me connect via my supervisor with the librarians who managed each of these resources under different subjects. I was able to work with the humanities librarian, Lisa Coats, the public health and psychology librarian, Meghan Smith, and several others.

These meetings constituted what I consider to be the most important aspect of technical writing — 

The opportunity and ability to communicate with trained experts in a field and produce effective writing informed by these collaborations.

This internship was also an opportunity to develop my writing skills as applied to new audiences. As a literary studies major, I primarily wrote for an academic audience using conventions and a voice meant for that group. Writing short web-based descriptions was different from this experience, and it helped widen my ability to connect and write for multiple audiences.

Everything I wrote for this internship was uploaded to the UNCW library website and even in just this short semester, I was able to see development in my writing. Every few weeks, I would review what I prepared in the Excel document for upload to the website. This really allowed me to see how my writing changed, how I began standardizing my voice, what conventions of writing I began using, and as I spoke with more specialized librarians, how my writing on topics that I don't have much experience with took a professional and informed shape.