Summer Intern Series: Learning to Develop a Project Plan in a Professional Context

BY Andrew Nakamura

One month after I graduated from the University of Michigan’s School of Information (UMSI) with my Bachelor’s degree in UX Design, I started my position as one of three 2024 summer interns with Harvard Library’s UX and Discovery team. My role involves a combination of user research projects on the library’s various systems and processes and participating in digital collections discovery projects. A few projects necessitated all three interns’ involvement. Still, each of us were also allowed to choose to either participate in or lead other projects, independently or as a group, selected from a broad range of options. The position felt particularly relevant to me because this summer marks a transitional point from my undergraduate studies in UX Design to my studies in library science with a focus on managing and sustaining collections as a part of a one-year master’s degree program at UMSI this coming fall. I wanted to get a glimpse into parts of library workflows in which I was inexperienced in preparation for my upcoming coursework and to determine my interest in different roles for my future prospects after my graduate studies.

In my second week as an intern, my interest in curatorial and collections work led me to take on leading a project curating public domain sets, modeled after the Library of Congress’s Free to Use and Reuse Sets, which are collections of materials in the public domain grouped together by theme for library patrons to use for any purpose. This project also served as an exploration into the process of curating a free-to-use and reuse collection, and another main goal was to document the process and evaluate if this type of project would be worthwhile for curators in the future.

My first major task was to create a project plan that would serve as a statement of the project’s goals, milestones, timeline, team, and tasks. The project plan template I used as an example helped me identify the parts of the project I needed to map out, but I wasn’t sure how to fill in the blanks. I thought back to my experience creating a project plan for my final capstone project at the end of my undergraduate career, but I found that planning in a professional environment was much more open than the plan I had made to fit a graded rubric with specific criteria for the details that needed to be included in each section. I knew that I wanted to explore digital collection curation, but I did not have a framework for understanding the steps involved in the process nor the amount of time each would take. Several questions lingered in my mind: “How many sets should I be expected to create?” “How should I choose a topic?” “What are the goals driving the project?” I felt lost trying to ascertain “the” right approach to the project, and I felt increasingly dissatisfied as time passed and I remained uncertain about the sections I repeatedly wrote, deleted, and tried to write again to little avail. When I spoke to other members of the team, I received clarity on some of the logistical considerations that were unclear to me, yet due to this project’s nature as our first exploration into this type of curation, not every question had a clear answer. Instead I had to answer questions about my personal interests and capacities for the project: “How many sets do you want to create?” “What topic do you want to explore?” “What are your goals for the project?”

It occurred to me then that my approach toward the project plan shouldn’t be “what do I have to do,” but rather “what do I want to accomplish?” In classroom environments, while I possessed interest in the subject matter, the rigid structure of the courses placed work expectations upon me, without much opportunity for me to define my own approach to projects. While those constraints are applicable and necessary to a classroom environment, I found my approach to satisfying the criteria of graded assignments wasn’t applicable to my professional goals in a one-to-one way. In some ways, the responsibility of a project yet to be structured comes with a heavy weight, but it also allows me the freedom to explore my genuine interests in avenues that meticulously designed school projects do not. I learned to embrace the ambiguity of the project plan, knowing that through the uncertainty, I could identify an approach that works for me. Moreover, the support from the team encouraged me to identify and pursue my own goals and gave me flexibility in consideration with my involvement with concurrent projects.

When I finished the project plan, I still didn’t have all the answers to the questions I pondered early in the process. I’m currently scheduling an internal content strategy meeting, which involves a planned approach to content creation by placing audience and goal-based considerations at the forefront of the decision-making process, rather than a solely content-driven approach divorced from the context of practical use by library patrons. I wanted to develop a content strategy to further elucidate my vision for the project’s purpose and audience, as well as decide the best platform for the finalized set. The first time I had ever heard the term “content strategy” was during this internship, so I was even less familiar with the concept than I was with the project plan. However, I feel much more open to this uncertainty knowing that I have the ability to determine the direction of the project through my understanding of my own goals.