Made a dent.
After being a practice supervisor for several years, I am still shocked every time a student tells his or her story about a negative experience from a previous internship site. Meanwhile, I’ve seen damaged students come in who have made a dent. Less self-confidence, insecure and not feeling taken seriously. Harassment, false accusations and being treated as a slave have since passed in review. Now I don’t want to say that the Fabryk is Valhalla. Here too, internships do not run well and are sometimes out of control that we have to say goodbye to each other.
Real participation in the Fabryk
At the Fabryk, everyone participates for real. That means the products students design and create are provided with serious feedback. As a company, we see if a product is or can become so good as to become a real product of Fabryk Design. The product is then placed on the website and thus participates for real. To get designs and products to this point, they are provided with serious feedback at various stages. You have to learn to deal with that feedback, and we try to guide this as best we can. We try to make people understand that if a design or product is not good enough, that does not mean that the student is not good enough, or even that the product is not good. The product may be fine, just not appropriate for Fabryk.
“Help! My product is good”
But even if a product is good enough, we try to give the student the right handles. Students often begin to have doubts: “have I figured everything out, is it well put together, is the product really good enough, etc”. Of course, it’s also super exciting when your design or product hits the site. And when it gets there, it’s a good product and the Fabryk stands behind it 100 percent. We walked the road together with the student. From design to site. Looked together at the possibilities and impossibilities and hoisted any mistakes together. And yes a mistake may have crept in, but then we did that together. And then again, we are going to solve that together.
Handholds for the future
Subject matter students are often well versed. They know how programs work, how to get machines working or how to find today’s or tomorrow’s trends. Creativity is often their second nature. Being super good at drawing or coming up with the most beautiful ideas is often not a problem. Not standing up for yourself, not daring to set boundaries, low self-confidence, perfectionist and not being able to handle feedback well are pitfalls that I encounter a lot within work. Pitfalls that we at the Fabryk focus on precisely so that these students are given tools to become healthy professionals in the future.
A safe environment for a healthy professional.
Providing tools to become a healthy professional is important to us at the Fabryk and we pay extra attention to this during internships. We ask for personal learning goals and guide students accordingly. Regular internship discussions focusing mainly on personal learning goals. In doing so, creating a safe climate in which students are allowed to state their boundaries, say “no” and take a stab at things makes for great practice moments to get one step closer to that healthy professional after the internship.
-X- Mhairu
