Who I am

Source: Shalini Rana

Hello!

My name is Shalini and I am a Creative Writing student studying at Virginia Tech.

My Toolkit of Skills

This summer I am taking Writing and Digital Media with Dr. Carlos Evia, in order to fulfill my major requirements and learn about the ways in which design, writing, and technology interesect.

In just one summer session, I have gained some invaluable skills that set me apart as a creative writing student functioning in an increasingly technical world. Some of those skills are:

• HTML coding in the context of website design
• Utilizing Markdown to simplify web design
• Creating and updating repositories on GitHub
• CSS formatting within HTML sites
• Creating and exporting podcasts

The Value of Experience

In addition to this class, I am working a full-time internship at Ford Motor Company as an IT Business Analyst intern. For my project, I am designing and constructing database models for the Access/Excel tool my team is working on. I am also gathering and documenting business requirements for our current tool's restructuring so that future developers that come on the team can understand functionality issues that need to be fixed. In this role, I am able to develop and use my design-thinking in a technical setting and also apply technical writing skills when writing the business requirements. My artistic mindset that comes from being a creative writing major allows me to easily think in the way my teams wants in order to solve problems around our tool. This could not be a more opportune time to take Writing and Digital Media because I am noticing that the concepts in design thinking I'm reading about in this class directly apply to my internship. For example, as a side project I am working with a group of interns in an IT Innovation Challenge. This challenge allows us to create a prototype for an idea that could be implemented at Ford. After understanding the importance of groups rendering their intent for a design, typically applied in HCI communities, I help foster this framework of thinking in my own group project setting. My group is also using MyBalsamiq to create a mock-up design for our app idea--a tool I only learned about through this class.