SUMMER INTERN SERIES FEATURING JOSH ARNOLD – And that’s a wrap
At this point, I have completed my internship in the Emory Healthcare system in the Ob/Gyn department. I am not a web-designer, but somehow I managed to reconstruct 19 webpages for the Emory Ob/Gyn Residency Program. All pages are now live and we have begun to see some positive preliminary results.
Ten weeks ago, I had some ideas of how to improve the webpages, however, I did not know where to begin or even how to work the back-end of the website. The number of improvements and types of new features I could incorporate into the newly designed webpages seemed endless and overwhelming. But I must say that this is where my Goizueta training came into play. In the beginning stage of the internship it was essential that I pause to assess the problem before ever devising a solution. There are way too many possibilities of how to attack the problem in order to arrive at a viable solution, but if I had jumped in too quickly it could have meant strolling down a seemingly correct path only to find out later it is turns out to be faulty. Given such a short internship period, time did not permit such a drastic error and squander of effort.
Developing my action plan, execution steps, and implementation strategy early on largely facilitated tackling the project methodically and efficiently. I had three main webpages I needed to complete as part of the overall residency program website. In the end, I completed 19 webpages and published nine of them as early as a month ahead of schedule. Using Google Analytics, I examined whether these webpages that went live earlier than expected experienced any positive results. Eight of the early published webpages saw anywhere from a 19% to 108% increase in the number of unique pageviews compared to the previous two-month period prior to the start of my internship. This was a huge sense of accomplishment and success.
There were certainly some challenging moments, especially when the CMS was slow to respond. Despite that, I learned a number of lessons from my internship. The main lessons are always keep the audience in mind with regard to the message I am trying to convey, with power comes responsibility and accountability, chaos can be organized, and impressive products can come out of turning ambiguity into tangibility.