Hello all,

I can’t believe I’m writing this post! It’s been almost 2 years since I started but it feels like I’ve worked here forever and yet it feels particularly strange to be leaving so soon.

 

When I first started, I was recovering from a semester where I had to quit my internship and drop all my classes due to a personal crisis. I was excited and surprised to receive an offer from LAITS after a Zoom interview w/ Suloni and Valerie from my parents’  poorly lit office.

 

Fast forward 2 years, and I feel like I’ve grown so much, in my hard skillset as well as confidence in myself and what I can bring to a team. I’ve had the chance to work on such a wide variety of projects alongside other wonderful STAs and full-timers and learned so much along the way. I’ve also figured out what I want to do with my life, and will be transitioning into the accessibility UX field soon.

 

Thank you to Suloni for being the best manager I could ever hope for, Valerie for constantly being a supportive & kind supervisor, and Maddy for the pączki recommendation (dziękuję bardzo! Napewno bedziemy przysłym tygodniu tam pojechać). Thank you also to the lovely STAs past & present, you all have genuinely been such fun, friendly people to work with and I hope we can all stay in touch.

 

As for my post-LAITS and post-graduation life, at the end of this month I will be starting at GBH (part of PBS and NPR)’s National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) — a lot of acronyms, I know – as an Accessibility Analyst for their consulting group. It’s a largely remote position, but I will be moving to Boston, their headquarters, in a couple weeks. I’m beyond excited for this next chapter of my life holds, but I’m also very sad that this means that this chapter is coming to a close. I can credit the STA program with so much of my professional and personal development over the past 2 years, and that means more than I can ever possibly put into words.

 

COLA Web Refresh has continued to be my primary focus. I, Adrian, Anya, Lorena, Chris, Michelle, and a handful of other people have been working hard to clean up sites auto-migrated to Pages and hand them off to the client. It’s a pretty enormous task, so I undertook additional hours for the remainder of my time here in order to help as best as I can. I finished cleaning up the site for Government yesterday, so pending any feedback or requested changes from Chris, Michelle will soon send it off to Sarah for review.

Next up is Latino Studies — a constellation of sites similar to the structure of Black Studies, with the trifecta of a department, center, and institute under its umbrella. I’ve finished cleaning up the “umbrella” site of Latino Studies, as well as the Latino Research Institute (LRI) sites, but that leaves MALS and CMAS.

This week, after wrapping up the Dana Center: Carnegie project, I’ve spent most of my time working on various COLA web refresh tasks.

Work in the production server has begun, and it’s a time crunch to get everything (that has already been auto migrated) cleaned up and redesigned in time.

I focused on Black Studies and affiliated sites (e.g. IUPRA, Warfield Center, RIM, AADS). Below is a screenshot with an example of my results.

 

I plan on undertaking more hours in order to help speed up work on this project

https://sta.laits.utexas.edu/44288-2/

I’ve been working on Dana Center Carnegie Case Studies.

In case you aren’t familiar with the project, Dana Center has funding and a need for 3 separate content design/InDesign layout projects. One of them, Arkansas, has already been completed by my lovely coworker Rachel!

That leaves the Carnegie and Strategic Direction projects. I’m not going to go in depth about the latter, since it’s an infographic centered project led by Cristina and Rachel at the moment. The Carnegie project includes 4 case studies on “Math for Manufacturing: Workforce and Higher Education Partnerships” and 1 process document. We have received content for 3 case studies.

This week I spent much of the time working on the first case study, on KY FAME.

I used Rachel’s Style B template, which had been approved for this project. However, I made some alterations on the template level as I went on, refreshing myself on paragraph and character styles as well as a little bit of GREP. For a project like this, one of the biggest concerns and most important components is consistency. To some degree, I can ensure this automatically, but I’ve also been taking notes on style in order to prepare a comprehensive style guide to accompany the 3 case studies.

I also received some pretty fast feedback from Ophella (a writer at the Dana Center) and Alison (main client), which helped guide refinement of my draft.

This project was a bit out of my comfort zone, I haven’t worked with InDesign since doing a basic training on it almost 2 years ago, so it’s definitely been a work in progress; however, so far, I am happy with my progress and the results!

https://sta.laits.utexas.edu/43938-2/

Hello blog! I promise someday I will be better at keeping up with you. Recent activities:

Dana Center Carnegie Work 

So far I’ve been on the sidelines of this project, but starting next Monday I’m going to start entering and formatting content for Carnegie case studies using templates made by Rachel. We ran into some roadblocks with not having updated InDesign on any of the Design Lab machines, so I’m either going to bring my laptop next week or work on a computer Mike set up in a studio on the 4th floor.

COLA Web Refresh

Chris and Michelle have Adrian and I working on reformatting the LACS “Where Students Intern” site. Here is the current site. Each “review” is a separate page in Cascade (currently here). The new, redesigned site will include accordions instead of separate pages. Screenshot (below). This is a fairly time-consuming task, because it’s full of a lot of information.

Personal News

On a more personal note, I’ve received an offer from GBH’s National Center for Accessible Media, a consulting group for digital accessibility efforts within a public broadcasting organization. I have a start date of May 30th at their Boston office, with the job title of Accessibility Analyst :~) I can’t overstate how excited and grateful I am for this opportunity. Thank you so much to Suloni, Valerie, and Michelle for being my references!!

The COLA Web Refresh project is closer to full swing!

I’m currently zeroing in (along with Lorena and Adrian) on process documentation.

Project: COLA Web Refresh Project (Phase 3 Pre-Auto Migration Process Documentation)
Client: College of Liberal Arts
Completion Status: In progress, will finish this week probably
Staff Guidance: Michelle (PM), Chris (content strategist)
STA Team Members: Adrian, Lorena
Description/Plans: Chris, Geoff are still working on auto-migration script that will auto-migrate pages for all departments/centers/institutes/units end of this month, so for now me and a couple other CMSTAs are working on process documentation. What does this mean? Basically, noting what the script failed to pick up, or maybe transferred strangely, things we may want to document and expect to work on manually cleaning up in the future. A lot of this has to do with design, layout, or image issues.

https://sta.laits.utexas.edu/43657-2/