This week I completed my report on mobile technology for The Association of Virtual Worlds. My site supervisor gave me much positive feedback and thought it was "excellent," but wanted me to make changes to my bibliography. She wanted the changes to better meet the bibliography format needed for the report. Originally, I had listed my site supervisor as the author of the blog posts on mobile technology I used as references. I instead followed my site supervisor's advice by removing her name as the author of the information and replaced it with the original sources of the information as the authors, followed by the dates of publications, titles, and quick links to the blog posts made by my site supervisor. I removed other things (some APA formatting) that would be more appropriate for graduate course term papers, and added whatever my site supervisor wanted and that would be better for business reports.
My advice to other virtual interns, certainly future interns, is when they have a site supervisor who has them do a paper or report, that they must closely and clearly communicate with their site supervisor to learn about how they should format and organize their work (such as title page first, table of contents second, conclusion last, or a particular order of bibliographical information). The intern should know that a site supervisor may not want the same type of formatting or organization that their graduate professors want, and that the formatting and organization of reports may have to adhere to the types of businesses they are interning for.
Overall, it was a successful assignment and my site supervisor appreciated the work I put into it, that I had closely followed her rules, that I made some good cases in favor of some of the mobile technologies, but also that I added a section on negative aspects to mobile technology like cyber bullying and techno stress. I focused on both positives and some negatives so that I would avoid bias. I know my next assignment will be the first week of April, so I will certainly be interested to see what my site supervisor will have me do and learn next.
You are the second student to mention the difference in formatting for reports/papers for work and those required for class. The fact that these reports remain digital means links, for example, can be used in business reports where (at least or now) we would not use them in academic reports.
ReplyDeleteGood advice for future interns - thanks!