Internship Portfolio

English 498/504
Internship in Writing and Editing

Think of your portfolio as a concise yet exhaustive display of the skills, knowledge, and expertise you have nurtured during your internship. To compile this portfolio, review your intern log or journal entries along with all of the projects you have worked on this semester. As you pore over them, try to derive categories for your work. For example, if you worked as an editor, you may have found yourself making some corrections resulting from simple proofreading for typos, some for issues of usage, some for conformity to in-house conventions, some at a macroscopic level that condensed five paragraphs to three, etc. Make these categories the mainstay of your portfolio.

(You can see an example of categories known as “levels of edit” as developed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory years ago at the following link:
http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:gjlN1W5P4AIJ:www.stc.org/confproceed/1998/
PDFs/00055.PDF+jet+propulsion+lab+levels+of+edit&hl=en&ie=UTF-8)

Working with such categories, review your work for those instances that best illustrate your expertise. Excerpt those instances from the texts on which you worked by copying and pasting them into a new file. (Alternatively, you might photocopy the entire text, if it is short enough.)

Once you have at least one example for each of the categories you have derived, compose a short introduction to your portfolio, stating the nature of the work, the location, etc. Then tell your reader the story of your internship, pointing out the challenges you faced and the successes you mustered. (You might want to condense some passages from your Reflective Analysis of the Internship and include them here.) Imagine as your reader a busy professional who would want to glean very quickly and easily that you have the skills and knowledge s/he seeks in a collaborator or employee.

The finished product should be several pages assembled in a professional-looking folder that could accompany you on an interview or be sent through the mail. Or, better yet, you could compile an e-portfolio.