3D Girls Inc. has spent 15 years introducing girls to STEAM career paths through mentorship and hands-on programs. As the documentarian intern, my role has been to put that history and that ongoing work on camera, producing footage for a documentary celebrating the organization's 15th anniversary, and creating short-form video content from its summer STEAM camps.
My two main projects this summer have paralleled each other. Assisting with the anniversary documentary asks me to look back, pulling together previous interviews, media from the archive, and present-day footage into a singular narrative about what 3D Girls Inc. has built over the past 15 years. The STEAM summer camp content asks me to look forwards, helping to capture the organization's work as it happens: seeing the girls learn about all of these different career opportunities they may pursue.
Both projects required me to use various software like Adobe Premier Pro and Canva where most of my skill-building has happened. I've gotten better at creating short video form content for social media and its fast-paced flow.
Coming into this position as an industrial design student. I expected the technical side to be the steepest learning curve as I wasn't extremely familiar with video editing as a whole. Instead, I discovered that the harder skill has been storytelling. To document an organization means constantly deciding what to leave out, that decision says as much about a story as what makes the final cut. Design and this internship share a core problem, how do you make something both true and compelling? Anything you design requires storytelling, when creating a product you're solving a problem and taking consumer stories and translating that into a physical object that solves these problems.
Looking ahead, I'm grateful to have had this experience of being a more "non-traditional" intern, being able to see the fruits of 3d Girls Inc.'s labor and then seeing the whole process of planning next year’s summer camp and their other initiatives. By the time that the 15th anniversary documentary is finished it will help to represent 15 years of work by 3D Girls Inc and one summer of mine. A small glimpse into an organization that's been building something much larger than any singular project and its own community. This internship has also shown me a version of design work I hadn't considered before, using film instead of a physical object to solve the same problem of translating someone else's story into something others can understand. I'm carrying that lens forward into how I think about my own design practice.
This reflection is part of Georgia Tech’s Social Impact Fellows program, offered through the Institute for Leadership and Social Impact (ILSI). This program connects students with nonprofit and community organizations in Atlanta for semester-long, hands-on project experiences designed to foster co-learning, social responsibility, and personal growth. To learn more about program details and application information, please visit our program webpage.