When I found out I got the internship at G/L, I was really excited to finally gain experience at an agency. My goal throughout my college career has been to get experience in as many different industries as I can to have a good idea of what I want to do by the time I graduate from Mizzou. At school, I enjoyed my strategic communications classes that put us students into a team that acted as a mock agency, so I was excited to get an internship with a real agency this summer.
Admittingly, I was a little nervous at the start. Having to juggle multiple campaigns at once seemed daunting – at my previous internships I only had to focus on one and that got overwhelming at times. I was eager to learn how it all came together and how everyone worked together to get things done.
On my first day, Tim Leon told me that if there are other things I see in the office that I’d like to try, tell him and he’d make it happen. I decided to take advantage of that sentiment – it couldn’t hurt to gain experience in different areas.
Before I knew it, in addition to writing copy for social media posts and writing blogs for the website, I began to write press releases and take headshots of everyone in the office. I was able to gain experience getting to know our clients in different ways. I was given beneficial feedback to help sharpen my skills as a person in the marketing world. It all clicked: I had to take initiative in order to gain valuable experience.
I learned a lot by taking initiative. I was able to gain more experience and really gauge what role I think I’d like the most in the future. One thing that was always highlighted no matter what area I was working in was just how important it is to pay attention to detail. One word really can really make a difference – especially when it comes to social media that tends to have small copy. Even if you’re posting the same thing to each platform like Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn, your audience is different on each so it’s important to cater the captions to them specifically. You have to make it mean something to them.
This attention to detail will always stick with me in my future work. For example, before I even started to work on anything at G/L, they showed me their social strategy for their biggest clients. They wanted me to fully understand the voice and tone of each brand before I got started so that I could understand the goals. This really opened my eyes – I had never approached social media in such a strategic way before.
Not surprisingly, this attention to detail has really helped give me confidence in my abilities and what I’m doing. At previous internships, social media was done more on-the-fly rather than planned out. While that taught me many things, being thrown into it made me feel unsure of myself given the fact that I didn’t have much experience in the field. At G/L, I was able to make up for that. I gained confidence in my writing skills and that I can, in fact, write effective copy in specific tones.
As I wrap up my time at G/L, I can confidently say that I can picture myself working at an agency in the future. The teamwork and variety of clients is an encouraging and fun way to work. It has been fun to flex different parts of my brain to strategize campaigns for clients. I can’t wait to bring this experience with me back to school and into my career.