Bakalyar 1

Caleb Bakalyar

Dr. Bittel

Spring Internship

12 May 2023

Internship Reflection

To begin my reflection, I would like to look at my learning objectives and see

how I feel about them now, and reflect on what I learned from them. My learning

objectives were: experiment with different types of workplace writing to build real world

experience in multiple different styles, understand the differences between writing for a

real world audience versus writing for an academic audience, and apply the same

passion and tonal elements of my writing to my workplace projects.

As far as the first objective goes, I feel that I was able to effectively experiment

with a few different professional forms of writing. The first type of writing that I really

worked with was email. Email’s are a genre that I was previously familiar with, however

sending them for work is quite a different experience. I think what made it so different

was I wasn’t really writing something about missing class or turning in an assignment,

but rather I was writing to people hoping that they would write back and eventually it

would lead to us selling products as a company. This made my focus pretty different in

the email, because although I was able to use my own style, the purpose of the whole

thing was to sell products. This was definitely a little different, and I think that I was

happy to learn how to write like this about a product that I already knew so much
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about. I’ve been selling running shoes and studying English since I was a freshman, so

pairing these things together for writing really was a match made in heaven. Overall I

think that the emails didn’t teach me much new, but showed me how to effectively

transfer my skills, and showed me that I have transferable skills from my degree that

will be useful in the future.

To take a step back, I wanted to write the profiles, and I really didn’t get a

chance to do this. I don’t think that this was a big negative experience for me because I

don’t think that these would have been drastically different from my experiences in

writing things for school. Profiles are profiles, and all in all I like writing them but it just

wasn’t something that worked out due to circumstances out of my control. As much as

I don’t think it would’ve been very different I would have liked to have the opportunity,

but this still taught me that you can only control what you can control and you’re not

going to be successful in everything you do.

The Issuu project was undoubtedly the most experimental form of workplace

writing that I set out to do. I really enjoyed doing this project, but I would caveat that by

saying that I didn’t really know what I was doing and didn’t have much direction in the

project. I’m solely responsible for picking this project and I wish that I had picked

something where I would’ve been able to use the people around me to provide

feedback or help guide me, but no one around me had done anything like this before.

Despite this, you don’t have to be successful to learn something in every situation. The

project was very ambitious and I really enjoyed the ability to write about different
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people and things around the event, and attempting to structure the whole thing.

Through trying to structure it I learned that it’s really difficult to do all of this by yourself

and sometimes writing is more than just writing and it includes things like graphic

design elements. Additionally, I learned that in this genre I had to be really concise.

There wasn’t a lot of room on each page and that made it really difficult to fill out each

page worth of things with anything that was actually worth reading. An example of this

is that on the page about the digital half marathon I really didn’t include many details

about how the actual event ran because I wasn’t able to fill out any of it without making

the text look ridiculously small. This type of writing is something I would like to do

again and look at more, but I think that in the future I would need more guidance from

someone who had done something like this in order to help me structure it better and

understand what I’m going to write about in more detail.

The final genre of workplace writing I got to engage in was more technical

writing with the employee training manual. I love this project and it’s something that

I’ve talked about doing for my entire time working here. Similar to the emails, this let

me combine my knowledge of something I already knew so much about with my

knowledge of how to sell shoes and help customers. Although I never wrote in this

genre, I felt that it was a low pressure environment to experiment in and figure out what

to do since only other employees were really going to read it. In other words, I knew my

audience very well and I knew the subject matter so well I wouldn’t really even need to

research it. Overall through this project I think the biggest thing I learned was again that
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I have very transferable skills and I need to be confident and understand that it’s okay

to trust myself and use my skills.

My second learning objective was to understand the differences between writing

for a real world audience versus writing for an academic audience. This was something

that was very easy for me to understand because it was something I had to constantly

think of while writing my pieces. One way that I understand how writing for a real world

audience is different is that people above me in management are going to see my

writing differently than me and may edit my work. An example of this is with a small

post that I made at some point for the Half-Marathon in which my original caption was

heavily edited. Writing for a real world audience, and in a professional setting,

sometimes means that you won’t be able to do what you want to do exactly and you

have to conform to the standard of the people who you are writing for.

Another thing I learned about this is that the product that the writer produces

has to be complete and of the highest quality. This isn’t always the case in academic

writing. I think a big difference is that in academic writing the purpose is to learn

something about writing, and in doing that you sometimes just have to turn something

in. In real world situations, your employer expects that you’re turning something in that

matches their expectations and an incomplete product or a product that’s just finished

may not cut it.

Something I didn’t expect that I learned is that a real world audience also might

not care and not listen. In academic writing generally my teachers and classmates have
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to listen to me because they’re graded on whether or not they do that. There’s no such

incentive for many real world audiences and they may not take the time to read your

piece or care about what you have to say and that’s something you have to accept and

adapt to.

My third learning objective was to apply the same passion and tonal elements of

my writing to my workplace projects. I was successful in this and I really think that I put

my heart into most of these projects whether I was successful or not. I really liked that

my voice came through in the email I sent to coaches. I think that in sales in general it’s

important to insert your personality and to have a human touch to things especially in a

small business because that’s the main strength of working for a small business

anyway. Even in my more serious work like the manual, I think that my passion and

voice came through in the mere volume of information and detail that I included.

Despite the fact that this objective is a little bit more focused on emotion, something

I’ve learned through my time here at Marywood is that emotion is essential to writing,

and people can tell when you do or don’t really care about what you’re doing. I think

that makes a big difference and I always want to strive to do work where I am

passionate about the things that I’m doing and I can show people that.

I want to conclude my reflection with some general thoughts about future

employment and workplace functions that I learned through this internship. One thing

about my future career prospects that I learned is although I can try to do something

with my degree somewhere that is seemingly hiring me for those things, they may
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seem more indifferent about those skills and may want to utilize me in other places in

the company that are more useful to those company’s needs. I would ideally like to

seek a job in a related field because I spent so much time working towards this, and if I

want to do that I know now that I have to be careful in what I’m pursuing because I

don’t necessarily have much work experience outside of retail, and that may play to a

negative for me. Overall, I also learned so much about general operations at a small

business and how the meetings work and the chain of command. I was included in

several meeting and email chains that I was previously not responsible for, and I was

expected to manage things in a more professional way than I had in the past. While

these weren’t directly related to any of the projects I completed, it taught me a lot

about being an effective worker, and gave me even more skills that I can use to

showcase my workplace skill set in the future.