During my co-op at Keurig Dr Pepper, I was aware from the get-go that I would have an opportunity to make an impact on the work my team was doing. My supervisor let me know that along with other smaller assignments, I would be heading a project to build out the requirements for a specific component on the brewers and building a test fixture to record its key quantitative attributes—such as the force to remove the component during routine use.

I would largely be in charge of determining what kind of research I wanted to do in order to substantiate the values and requirements I would propose to the team at the end of the co-op. My predecessor did some excellent work on a similar component, and I was able to build off of his work with the test fixture when I redesigned it for the new application. However, in many areas I had to start from scratch.

This allowed me to establish my own method for capturing qualitative data in a repeatable fashion, to determine which product attributes mattered most to users and why. As I worked, then, I always ensured that I was making my work as easy to find, access, understand and replicate without my input, so that when I left, my team and successor would have everything they needed to pick up my work where I left it and move on.

In addition to the habit of strategically structuring documents, naming and locating files, this practice also culminated in a PowerPoint presentation summarizing all of the work I'd done during my co-op, hyperlinked throughout to relevant documents and information. I'd had experience presenting on my work and communicating it to leadership teams and to other individuals who had interest in our work, and this was the culmination of those learnings to date.

Those presentations were given periodically, with my team, throughout the co-op, and this final presentation was similarly structured. It was easy to skim for folks who only had the interest or time for doing so, and for those who wanted to delve a little deeper, I aimed to make it easy to access the relevant information. By the end of my time there, I’d earned a good reputation among my coworkers for my slide deck design, and these are skills I intend to bring forward into my career—the importance of structuring information strategically has been reinforced in several design courses so far, and I've seen its benefits firsthand. I anticipate using it often and look forward to growing in my ability to efficiently and clearly communicate my work and that of my future teams in this way.