White October Work Experience — Alayna’s Story

This week we’ve had Alayna with us on a work experience placement from City of Oxford College.

Over to Alayna…

Alayna’s Story

Hey, I’m Alayna and I have never actually written a blog post before!

Day 1

We started the day off with introductions, everyone was very friendly and welcoming. I was allocated my own desk which was great, I had my own little space beside my ‘mentor’ for the week. Frances, she was the person that I contacted to arrange this work experience placement.

Change of plans, I’m going to do this in bullet points.

• Introductions: I was introduced to the team (whom were very welcoming). I was introduced to each of them individually, they explained their roles to me and I said what I was doing there. I was also given a mini tour of the place which was really amazing.
• Ops meeting: So Mondays was packed with meetings, which was great for me as it gave me an in depth view of what the agency does and the projects that they were working on. The first meeting I was shadowing was the ops meeting. This consisted of the project manager discussing all current and potential projects.
• Lunch
• Tasks & other: I was allocated little tasks such as writing a review on the White October website, comparing it with similar businesses and giving recommendations on how they could improve it (they were working on a new website for the business). Besides me was Ed a software developer, he was so friendly (much like everyone else). He talked me through what he was doing at the time and talked me through how Google Analytics works.

Day 2

The second day at White October was pretty interesting. I started off with doing some testing with Durva. We were testing the new White October website (which is amazing). Durva talked me through her role as a tester and how she works with the developers.

Moving on to further in the day, I sat in on a design meeting with all of the designers, a front-end developer and a project manager. They went through a couple of ideas they had come up with, projects they had been working on, images in Drupal / Perch, grids and help guides for clients. Of course they were further elaborating on everything they were going through, or I would have been completely lost. It was actually was very interesting, it really gave me an insight on how websites and apps are designed (it is a hell of a lot more complicated than I initially thought).

The other 3 days :)

Overall my experience working in White October was great! I got to learn about all the the roles that help keep the agency running, which is exactly what I wanted. I went in there with an open mind willing to experience each aspect of the business, so I myself have more of a clear idea on what I would like to do in the future (uni,career).

I was able to talk and learn from the marketing team, software, design and project managers. This experience was truly rewarding and everyone is so kind and helpful, it really has such a positive atmosphere.