Combating ennui in virtual internships
Junior Cameron Garber has several strategies for make a virtual internship feel more like a traditional one.
Even though my internship is already halfway over, I’m still learning new things every day. Today, that came bright and early at 8 a.m. — but halfway through the day for my colleagues in London — when Josh, one of those colleagues, asked me if I knew how to use subtitles in Premiere.
Like most film production students, I’ve been using Premiere Pro since I was a freshman at IU, and I know my way around the workspaces pretty well. But subtitles were one thing I never learned how to do. I told Josh as much — because it’s always better to admit you don’t know something than to pretend you do and get in way over your head — so he sent me a tutorial video to watch along with the videos that needed subtitles.
I watched the video, and the process seemed straightforward and simple enough, until I opened a project on my computer. The Premiere workspace I had open in front of me was completely different from the one from the video, and I wasn’t sure why. I messaged Josh to let him know, but when he didn’t respond to my message, I figured out a different way to put in the subtitles.
When I exported the newly subtitled video, Josh pointed out that there was something off with the spacing between the letters and words in the subtitles. After about a half hour of troubleshooting, both over Slack and eventually screen-sharing on Zoom, we discovered the problem: I hadn’t updated Premiere in the beginning of the month, and the function I needed to fix the problem with the subtitles didn’t exist! This was also why my workspace looked different from the video tutorial.
Even though Josh said it would be alright if I used a different font, I was determined to deliver the video with the proper one. So, I updated Premiere and did the subtitles again. I’m really grateful that I learned how to use them, because subtitles make videos so much more accessible, and being able to do them myself is better (in my opinion) than relying on a website to auto-generate them for me.
I learned a lot more today than just how to use subtitles in Premiere. I learned that it’s OK to ask for help if you need it, how to troubleshoot an issue over Zoom and that it’s OK to use YouTube tutorials to learn quick skills like how to make subtitles. Just because you don’t know something doesn’t make you an amateur, and it shouldn’t make you feel unqualified. First and foremost, you’re in this internship to learn.