Harlin Mason: It's a Simple Task, Right?
Last fall I was able to become a Marketing and Donor Relation Intern at a local non-profit right next to Lander. The staff is very small and very kind; I was able to help with all kinds of work including administrative tasks, accounting upkeep and marketing work. The team is older and I often felt very young compared to their expertise, but I felt like I kept up decently well. That changed the day I was given a task everyone assumed I could handle—everyone except me.
I was presented with a seemingly simple task. Our board of directors wanted us to create and publish a Community Response Fund application where non-profits across the county could ask for money to rebuild after Hurricane Helene. I was given an outline to create the application itself, and was able to format all the information in a day. Once I finished it, my boss handed it back to me and said "Awesome, publish it to our website.”
Out of pure habit I responded with “Of course!” and I went to sit back at my desk. It was at that moment I realized that I've never edited a website before. I didn't even know what platform we used. I just said “Of course!” to something I did not know how to do. I went back to him asking questions that made it seem like I knew something about web design; I asked what platform we used, if we had a web designer and if he had a log in for me to use. Unexpectedly, I was thankful he looked at me like I was crazy, because he had no answers to the questions either.
Apparently, the last president had a degree in graphic design and handled everything himself, but my current boss was a lawyer by trade. I left that office with no more information, but with the same task. I sat back down thinking, ‘Ok, something has to be on our shared server.’ and I spent around an hour going through six years of saved files on my desktop for anything that was related to our website.
After around an hour I found login passwords under technology protocols. I was ecstatic. I thought the solution was close, until I noticed that the subject line for the login information just said ‘Website’. No actual platform name or place to log into; that's fine, we continue the search. The date on the document was back in January of 2020, so I went into researching our past partners in our accounting records. I found a name that sounded like a website company, it was called ajdesign. I looked into their platform and the login information I found worked. We were in!
After logging in, I found myself staring at a platform that had words I did not recognize in these little boxes that connected to these sections labeled media, plugins, appearance and much more. The organization was definitely set up for a web-designer, not someone who worked on Adobe and Canva.
I immediately went to Youtube tutorials and searched up definitions of words I didn't recognize. He doesn't know it, but this man named Mike who publishes videos on how to work the platform, became my best friend for the next two hours. I found that the PDF I created could not actually be published as a PDF and had to be converted to a HJK document through the design platform. Then I had to find where on the website I was supposed to actually put the application and find what subsection, what action and what description to put it under. Eventually, I found the subjection for grants and found a way to upload this HJK document.
Finally, after extensive research and a lot of misclicks, I hit publish. Now on our website there is a little white box named GCCF Community Response Fund you can click on that brings up a three page word document. I’ve never been prouder. That was until he asked me if I could move it lower on the page; that adjustment took me about ten minutes to figure out.
When receiving this task I was annoyed that just because I was younger I was expected to know how to work everything regarding the internet, but I found that his thought process was justified. I am part of a generation where technology has been at our fingertips since first grade and I learned how to type a hundred words a minute by the beginning of high school. Even when he first brought up the task, I did not panic because I knew I could research it enough to understand it. I was not scared to make mistakes because I knew I could fix them. Even now, as AI becomes more prominent in the workforce and academic world, I’m not intimidated by it because I know how to use it. That moment taught me to take more pride in my adaptability, comfort with technology, and ability to learn quickly.
Harlin-Jane Mason will graduate in May of 2026 with a Business Administration degree with an emphasis in Marketing and Management. She started this work-study in the Fall of 2024 and looks to continue her professional career in South Carolina.