IDL: Screenmedia chats with first intern Rosa

Throughout June 2019, Rosa joined our team, the first of five interns from the TRC Inspiring Digital Leaders programme.

This unique internship programme offers five bright young interns a behind the scenes look at life in a creative agency. Each intern spends 4 weeks at one of the five participating agencies, immersing themselves in that agency’s specialist discipline, before moving on to the next agency, rotating through all five over the course of the summer. The programme gives each intern a fantastic, well-rounded view of how modern creative agencies operate, across a range of disciplines including Digital Marketing, Brand and Content, Client Services, UX and Design, and our project with the programme, Web Development. Taking part alongside Screenmedia are four of Glasgow’s top agencies; Dog, Equator, After Digital and Frontpage.

Our inaugural intern, Rosa, arrived four weeks ago. Hailing from Northern Ireland, Rosa initially completed a degree in English Literature at Glasgow University. During a two year excursion to China, she rediscovered her passion for coding and web development after meeting a group of developers.

Returning to Glasgow, she applied for a one year conversion course in MSc Software Development and arrived at Screenmedia in early June. Rosa joined our in-house team of web developers and under the direction of Lynne Finnigan - lead web developer and mentor to Rosa during her time here.

Throughout her four weeks at Screenmedia, she has been learning how our practice operates, getting an insight into how each of the teams contributes to our award-winning projects, and has tackled two projects of her own:

1. Her first project was coding a website for a hotel booking business run by her family. Under Lynne’s mentorship and guidance she learned and coded the site in Vue.js, completing the site in just 15 days, quite a feat even for an experienced developer.
2. Soon after, Rosa began working with our mobile and integrations teams to explore building her very own app for both iOS and Android - a tricky task for a first-timer. Entitled Polar, her idea allows users to pick their top three favourite news sources and the app then shows then selects news sources which sit at the opposite of the political spectrum and returns results from them. The intention is to break users out of the their political ‘bubble’ and let them see the other side’s perspective of issues. Rosa made good progress in setting off her idea, but with only a few days remaining of her stint with us, she had to save completing the project for a rainy day later on!

As her time at Screenmedia came to an end, we decided to ask Rosa a few questions about her experience and what she hopes to do with the future:

What’s something you learned while you were at Screenmedia?

I learned loads of stuff. That people can work in an environment which is relaxed but also there’s a sense of everyone working very hard. The atmosphere here is inspiring.

What’s been the best part of your experience at Screenmedia?

The best thing is and having access and mentorship from people like Lynne, who are so on top of their game. They were chipping in to help and show me how to get things done, it’s so crazy and so good. Not many people have that, even if you start a job, you don’t get a resource like that. That’s why the internship is very good.

What are your career ambitions? What’s your dream job?

I would aspire to be more full-stack, working across lots of different technologies. I’d like to cut my teeth on doing that for the next 5-7 years then look at going into more project management roles. At the moment I just want to focus on getting my skills up to scratch.

We’ve had a great time with Rosa in our studios, and wish her all the best for the rest of her summer! If you’re looking to take the next step in your career, check out the roles we have on offer, and see where you could fit in!