A Stress-Less Environment by "The Intern"

A Stress-Less Environment

I recently started my spring internship at a broadcasting company. I can't say I went into it with any real expectations, just to do my job well and learn what it's like to work for TV. And now that I've been there for a few weeks, I'm finally starting to feel comfortable with what I'm doing. Of course, I do the mundane jobs of an intern, I make the coffee, clean up after people, run things back and forth all day because my supervisors don't want to and just help out with little tasks. However, I really feel that my internship is giving me a chance to learn more than the average intern.

One thing the interns do is "pull tape." It literally means to pull the tape that's going to be used for a promo off the shelf. Sounds easy, right? I thought so too. Then I realized that there's about 10 different places this tape could be. I have to do a general search to find it, keep narrowing that search down until I find exactly what my supervisor is looking for, only to go to the place I think the tape could be to realize that it's missing. It's not fun, but it's one of the most important jobs to keep the show running. Working on a live show means always expecting the unexpected and dealing with it asap. So pulling tape may seem like an unimportant job, but when there's less than an hour to put promos together and you're the one who can take care of it with little help, this mundane job doesn't seem so pointless.

Aside from jobs like pulling tape, I've had the chance to do things that are really interesting and that I actually enjoy. Every day myself or the other interns update the links and recipes on our site. Aside from that, I've had the chance to upload slideshows and videos as well. Our Web site is one of the top in the country and is seen by people everywhere, so being trusted to keep up the standard isn't something to complain about.

Something I noticed immediately about my company is that they take everything in stride, and I've truly never seen anyone in my department too stressed or overwhelmed. I'm sure they have been, but my preconception about people who worked as journalists or for TV was that they were always working on a deadline and always stressed and grumpy. In less than two weeks my whole perception had changed. Seeing the people who run a live TV show get a call at 9 in the morning saying that their main guest has canceled and watching them simply work around it is amazing. I've never seen anyone shocked that a celebrity and his two band members were supposed to show up by 10:15 but at 10:30 the band members were there and the main attraction is nowhere to be found because he missed his flight. Obviously they don't have a choice but to deal with it, but the way that things are dealt with keeps the whole environment very calm and professional, and so far it is the one thing that has had the most profound effect on me.

"My Life" by Alyssa -- interning at an international social justice agency

My Life

My experience at my internship so far has been above and beyond my expectations. I have had internships before, but none that had me as involved as this one. I find myself looking forward to Wednesdays now just because I never know what task i will be dealing with in the office. Some days I am working on fair trade, the next it's malaria issues in Africa, and now it's Iraqi refugees in Syria and Lebanon. It also helps that the staff and my director that I am working with are just so eager to share their knowledge with me.

This Tuesday, Founder's Day, is just going to top everything off. I am so excited to meet the president of the organization I am working for, and also with Ishmeal Beah, a former child soldier from Sierra Leone. I have weaseled my way into every possible event they may be attending on Tuesday just because I want to learn everything I can about their work. I have made the ultimate decision on what I want to do with my life after interning, and I am now ready to hear how others feel about the work they do.

I have always felt the need to help people internationally, and for the longest time struggeled with the big question: What do I want to do with my life?

Everyone seems to have an opinion on what i should do:
1. Go for the job that will offer the most money!
2. Become a teacher
3. Be a news anchor
4. Do what makes you happy (for a long time i did not now what that was)
5. Take a job in the area, because we do not want you to move far away

Well, it's time for me to do what I want. I want to work in the non-profit sector to help advocate for the protection of children's rights. You hear too many horror stories about children being abducted and forced into child labor, slavery, prostitution, or used as soldiers. It's awful and it should be stopped and someone needs to be a voice for these children who have had that voice stolen from them. There is only one problem... how do I go about doing this? Not only that, but when I tell people that this is what I want to do, I get a lot of funny looks and people saying "Well, there is not a lot of money to be made in that field."

I do not care about pay. I need enough money for an apartment and food and gas and that is it. Right now I am paying for all of those things singlehandedly by babysitting and bringing home maybe $800 a month. As long as I have enough money to get by, the only thing I want to do is to be an activist for children. I am no longer going to listen to other people tell me how I should run my life. Interning here has opened my eyes to so many issues in the world that are going on unaddressed; I want to be there to help.

Fashion Forward by Christy

Thursday was probably the craziest day at the magazine I have seen so far. To start off the morning our building gave us each a BIG bag of Hershey Kisses to start off a wonderful Valentine's Day...but the rest of the day was not so wonderful.

In our upcoming issue we have what we call "Fashion Forward" - 3 months out of the year some of the biggest names in fashion run an ad in our magazine to promote their new line of clothing, in this case their Spring line. The magazine typically has about 11-12 fashion ads but this issue we have about 16, which is huge and also great for the magazine. What's not so great is waiting until the very last minute to get some of the ads in. Ship day is Friday which basically means if you ad doesn't get in our hands by Friday - it might get cut from the issue. We have deadlines that need to be met and for some reason at 3 p.m. on Thursday we were still sitting around waiting for some of the last minute ads. 10 e-mails and probably close to 30 phone calls later we had all 16 of the fashion ads in. They all needed to be fact-checked and then sent overnight to the publisher, who is vacationing in Florida so she can layout what the front of the issue will look like. On top of these 16 ads, others were coming in like crazy - a lot of fact-checking was needed.

Overall the day ended pretty well - the most important part of the day was getting all the fashion ads in. It looks like it is going to be a great issue. Whoever thought fashion could make me want to rip my hair out?

Leads, Counter Cards & Media Kits

This is a posting from Christy at a magazine advertising co-op:

On Thursday, I learned about leads. Leads are a huge part of the advertising business. A lead is a person who calls inquiring about information for the magazine. A sheet must be filled out with information from the caller. Usually these callers are looking for rates for running an ad in the magazine. My supervisor showed me how she took down information for a lead. After showing me she let me call back all the leads that left voicemails over night. I took down all the information and gave them to the correct account executive. After you have the information they must be filed into a “Lead Book” so they can be easily reached at any time. The final billing was also due this day for many of the advertisers from the last issue. I took care of typing a Word document up for each advertiser stating their remaining balance on their ad. I worked with some sales coordinators as well to determine how much money was made in each category of advertisements (fashion, food, travel, etc.) from 2007. This was interesting because I could see where the majority of revenue for the magazine came from.

Counter cards needed to be completed today. It is very important that the counter cards are displayed immediately after the magazine releases because it gives time for others to see our work in the magazine and potentially run their ads with us for the following month. After coming up with the basic layout for the counter cards I delivered them to the art department production. Media-kits needed to be prepared for shipping for our March potential advertisers. About 50 media-kits needed to be made all with different specifications and topics of interest. After making the media-kits I worked on producing something called an “e-mail blast." An e-mail blast is a type of advertisement that gets sent to a person's e-mail address. For this particular e-mail blast the advertisement was for a wedding dress trunk show that will be happening in early February. We took all the e-mail addresses from the previous trunk shows in 2007 and compiled them into one excel spreadsheet so we knew whom to send the e-mails to.