Week 6: Personal Contributions at Rowan
As I wrap up the sixth week of my internship, I decided to reflect on the various contributions I have made to my organization. I will be focusing on my work at the Rowan Community Music School (CMS), as that is where my tasks and projects primarily come from.
One of my biggest projects in this internship was overhauling information from the Rowan CMS’ old website into the layout of a new website. I made lots of leadership decisions regarding the ways in which I could best convey the message and mission of the organization and its programs on each page. For example, I realized that the old website had lots of text, and did not immediately draw your eye to any pictures. So, I made executive decisions while putting together the new layout that put images of people who were involved in their respective programs in order to best put forth the “community” that Rowan CMS serves. One such page was the Early Childhood page, on which there were minimal pictures and lots of text on the old site. Once I saw this, I communicated with my supervisors and sifted through the archives of Rowan CMS to find Early Childhood pictures that best represent the fun and exciting programs that the children enjoy at our Early Childhood Development Center. After I moved over all of the information and all of the big shifts to the new website were established, I was then asked to do an hour-long presentation to the Dean of Rowan’s College of Performing Arts. This was an exercise in leadership in itself as I had to prepare exactly what kinds of things about the website I wanted to highlight while relaying how the website embodies the mission of Rowan CMS.
Another one of my long-term projects in this internship (that is still ongoing) is this project that I launched called the Humanizing Musicians Project. For further context, below is a paragraph from the article that I posted to the new website about this project:
“The Humanizing Musicians, Artists, Dancers, & Actors Project is a long-term interviewing project that started in June 2021 which aims to compile the personal career journeys of notable people within the performing arts and music industry. The goal of the project is to provide a valuable, educational resource for high school juniors and seniors within the Rowan Community Music School who were thinking about pursuing music careers and wanted to hear what the professionals have to say. This project was inspired by an idea brought up by Advisory Board member Siiyara Nelson: to humanize musicians, dancers, and actors through conversations about how they started their careers. This would be done by creating a short series of experiences with musicians who would explain how they started their careers. The goal of each “experience” would be to have each interviewee answer the following questions: How did you get your start? What mentalities got you through challenges to get where you are today? What advice would you give to a young, aspiring student looking to do what you do? The big picture of this project is to help ambitious students formulate their own career paths, gain important advice from those who have been successful in their dream careers, and visualize the ways in which they would like to contribute to the performing arts and/or music industry in the future.
The way that this project was started was an insight about leadership that contributed to this project. Hearing Siiyara Nelson’s words about how making professionals’ experiences and advice accessible to the community are essential for establishing longevity in the arts made me want to take the initiative for this project.
Some other projects I worked on included the following: writing and copyediting the Rowan CMS July newsletter, managing Rowan CMS social media, and creating the layout for Rowan CMS’ very first Annual Report.