Bastion Intern: A look back

How it all started

I have been participating in the Bastion Phase of the internship program here at Gameskinny  and I thought I would share my experience. My journey through this internship started the Friday before deadline, I happened across a post about the internship and thought it sounded interesting. I could do that, I thought. So I contacted the internship coordinator Katy Hollingsworth to figure out what I needed to do to apply. I Was told to send in a resume, that was the one point where I almost got discouraged. I had never written a resume before, but I gave it a shot anyways, thinking that since I had no experience I wouldn’t get accepted. So glad I was wrong, because this has been an exciting ride.

Inexperience?

I started out with a bunch of different ideas as to what to post about (most of which I actually did post). However, most of these ideas weren’t getting any views (which was a requirement for the program), I didn’t think as much of it as I should have the first week, I thought my team had reached our minimum views even despite my lack of views. We missed our minimum by about 600. I chocked it up to our inexperience and hoped we’d improve on week two, especially since E3 was during week two.

Another hard week for me

Week two started, and so did E3. I glued myself to the computer for E3, I spent day 0 watching the big press conferences, but who didn’t? That was all we had assignment wise, and the only thing showing. The articles I caught and ran with were the Halo teaser, and the Destiny demo. Still I wasn’t raking in the views, so the rest of the week I watched the Square Enix stream. I figured with the announcement of Final Fantasy XV and Kingdom Hearts 3, the views would just rain from the sky. I found a few good articles, one being the Ifrit strategy for FFXIV, it started out slow but it eventually hit the ground at a run. Overall, I still did sub-par for the week, amassing around 200ish views, not even a 5th of the team minimum. I was crestfallen because of this, and went into week 3 a bit overwhelmed.

A turning point

After two weeks of not making the minimum, my focus moved from getting views, to writing what I know. It started out slow again, with a few random articles. I then discovered a huge debate on The Lodestone. (Final Fantasy XIV’s community site) It was about the fishing system being revamped. Final Fantasy XIV I knew, so I figured, this is it! I went with it, posting my thoughts on the debate and the system itself. The day after, while taking a short break in my “research gaming’ I happened to glance at Twitter. It just so happened that the official Final Fantasy XIV Twitter account posted about the new Lodestone Beta going live. That really was a lucky break on my part, the views just skyrocketed from the start. It ended up getting 525 views all on its own!

Going out with a bang!

While as a team we still missed our minimum by 40 views, I was finally understanding what I needed to do. I hope to take that knowledge from week three, and excel with it in this final week of the Bastion Phase. I do have two really big interviews coming up if I can get the answers back before the week ends. Here’s to hoping that this week is my best yet!