Three Things My Virtual Internship Taught Me

My Internship has been a hugely positive experience for me. It has helped me to grow and learn, not only in my field of study — I have also learnt a lot of transferable ‘soft skills’. Three of the most important that I learnt from my time on my virtual internship with Digicast were self-motivation, adaptability and communication.

Lesson #1 - Self-Motivation.

Motivation was one of my biggest worries going into the first lockdown, so naturally, when my internship turned virtual my concerns about motivation were even more prevalent. University life had somewhat taught me how to keep self-motivated, but this was usually based on deadlines. This new self-motivation came in the form of being responsible for my own progress and learning.

Getting up each day and working 30 hours a week from my bedroom was a daunting task, but with help from the people I worked with daily and weekly meetings with members of the team, I realised that routine, setting out clear goals and allowing a degree of flexibility to these things would be key to my success.

After my 10 weeks on the virtual internship, I am much more driven towards my goals and manage my time infinitely better than I had previously.

Lesson #2 - Adaptability.

As the weeks went on, I worked on numerous tasks and learned different skills from various people, not to mention the fact I was now doing this all from home in a makeshift office. The ability to adapt how I worked and how I learned was crucial to making the most of each day. I worked in three separate areas, with different mentors and different methods of teaching. This taught me so much, from 3D modelling all the way to 3D animation.

I started with lessons in 3D modelling, where I would be given a real life model to replicate, and would then spend my day working on that task. Each day i would have to try my hand at a different complex object, with my final piece coming as a video game character.

I also worked to rig and animate this character. In order to build up to this I had to complete different animation and rigging tasks so that I could understand the different roles within animation and rigging.

After this I worked on a head-scanning project for a famous Japanese games company, where we worked on retopologising the scanned meshes — creating realistic and usable 3D models of the actors' faces. As the work is strictly confidential, below is an example of the work I completed in order to learn the process.

Lesson #3 - Communication.

Communication is a skill I felt I didn’t need to work on before this internship, as I have often been praised for my communication skills, but I feel like one of the most important lessons I learnt on the internship is how important communication is when it comes to remote working.

Writing emails and video calls were my only form of communication with the team and conveying everything I wanted to say in these was very important. I couldn’t rely on others coming to me so I had to take control, be proactive and maintain professionalism.

This internship experience has been a huge help as I had never previously worked in a professional environment such as my internship. Now I am better prepared and better equipped for my next opportunity.