First Week in a New Field

As a Bonner Scholar on Campus, all of my previous internship experiences have revolved around service, and all of my sites were nonprofit organizations. This summer, I am working for a public relations firm in New York City which is a bit more fast-paced and profit-driven than my prior work at different organizations. This was good news for me, since I am a very high energy person and I thrive when there is always more work to be done.

I am the only intern in the New York office, and there are three others in the San Francisco office where Demonstrate PR is based. Since this is a boutique firm, my role as an intern is very similar to that of a full time account manager. My two supervisors and I work very closely to accomplish the goals that our clients want to reach. While I receive a lot of guidance from my supervisors, there is a large element of trust that plays a large role in my internship. Since the first day, they have been letting me run with my own ideas and present them to the team working in San Francisco. They regularly ask me if there are other projects I want to work on or if any of the other accounts interested me, so it is nice to know that there is wiggle room if I want to start working on different accounts as the summer progresses.

I can already tell that I should probably pursue a career closer to the actual field of marketing. While working in PR is helping me gain valuable business and research skills, I am constantly thinking of ways my clients could change their packaging, overall brand, social media and other aspects of their marketing strategies. This is a bit frustrating becasue when a firm is just paying us to do media relations, I am not in a position to make suggestions about their logo/type of packaging their product uses, but rather to research journalists and podcasts that could get their brand more media coverage.

Since this organization is bi-coastal, we often have conference calls with the team in San Francisco. This is an interesting aspect of the organization’s structure, because they have a few calls a week that I get to sit in on, but since most of the work is done in Google docs and they communicate constantly via Outlook, they do not need to talk a lot unless it is a conference call with the clients.

I am excited to keep learning from this organization throughout the rest of the summer!