Making the Most of Your Internships
It was my first day at my first internship at a marketing and public relations agency in Rocky Mount, NC. A writer at heart, I prefer to be behind the scenes, and the thought of doing broadcast journalism or being on a green screen, quite frankly, made me want to run and hide. The morning of my first day, the agency was discussing a video ad they needed to create for a bank with locations throughout North Carolina and Virginia.
“Let’s let Kaitlyn do it!” they said. By 10 a.m. that morning, I was on a green screen, reading from a teleprompter as the camera filmed my every move — something I never thought I would do.
Did I want to do it? Not exactly, but I couldn’t say no. In the end, I actually enjoyed it. As the summer progressed, I traveled to about 25 of the branches and did video interviews with the employees. Because one of the videos featuring me was on the bank’s website, it got to the point where I would walk into a branch and they would say, “Hey! You’re the girl on our website!” The introvert in me didn’t love that, but there was another part of me that had a whole lot of fun with it. By the end of the summer, I felt at ease in front of the camera and decided it wasn’t as scary as I once thought.
Moral of the story: Get outside of your comfort zone. Be open-minded, eager to learn and grow in skills. Step into your next internship prepared to tackle whatever it throws your way. You might be challenged, and you might be asked to do things you never wanted to do, but you might find out you like it after all. You’ll certainly become more comfortable with it, and you’ll probably have a lot of fun along the way. Make the most of your internships; you never know where it might lead you.
Kaitlyn Baker is a senior journalism and mass communication major at Samford University with concentrations in print and public relations. She is passionate about hearing and telling people’s stories with an aim to foster community and inspire hope. She hopes to pursue this dream in various capacities when she graduates in May 2021.
