William Hoff

Responsibilities

My daily responsibilities include various tasks related to my ultimate responsibility of constructing an E-commerce portal for the quilt shop. My daily tasks consist of routine scanning and categorization of items on the floor, general organizational and moving duties, and miscellaneous tasks that I may be more suited to complete than other employees of the shop.

Accomplishments

My greatest accomplishment from my experience in this internship is to see the full breadth of my work, this being the website for the Ames Quilting Connection. I am able to regularly check up on the appearance and overall organization of the website itself, as well as being able to see every item that I have scanned in and categorized and activated for online shopping. Though the website is still under construction, it is an incredibly rewarding experience to know that I am responsible for every item that will be available to purchase through this website.

Learning experience

The greatest lesson I have learned so far from my experience has been just how important labeling and naming is for a fabric or quilt shop. Many of the items in our data system had been entered either incompletely or incorrectly, and it took a bit of general training and instruction from my supervisor to be able to spot these issues. However, now that I have gone through nearly 2,000 individual items and corrected and completed the entries for each into our system, I have developed a much more refined level of scrutiny as I look through the individual items.

What advice would you give?

My advice for future students in the AMD program at Iowa State would be to seek out an internship/temporary position that allows you to work closely with an individual who has been in their position for (ideally) over 10 years. Being able to speak to someone who has seen everything and every change that has happened within the industry is incredibly helpful to prepare you for your entry into a career within the industry. I would also speak to the benefit of learning from even the most minor errors and mistakes made by yourself and others, as these are the moments that allow you to better prepare yourself for the future.