Internship

An internship is an interesting thing. When it’s good it’s great, and when it’s slow, it’s still pretty beneficial. The internship I completed last summer for the American Cancer Society of Bulloch County was a great experience. I was able to exercise several of my learned PR skills on an almost daily basis. On any given day I was responsible for creating PSAs to send out to all the Relay For Life team leaders from surrounding counties. Also, because it was always a good idea to maintain healthy relationships with these team leaders in order to keep their faith in ACS, I would sometimes be expected to have lunch meetings with these groups.

The internship wasn’t always so fulfilling, though. After all, we all have to start somewhere, right? It was not uncommon at the start of the internship to be responsible for creating spreadsheets with everyone’s information in the southeast who has participated in Relay For Life in the past 2 years (it is devastating and encouraging to find out that this is an incredibly large number). But I enjoyed the opportunity to prove myself worthy of other tasks through the brisk completion of simple ones.

My best advice to anyone looking for an internship is to complete one that makes you feel comfortable. One that can gain something from you, while offering you experience in return. Don’t worry too much about the pay in monetary terms, measure it in the amount of skill and knowledge you acquire from your work there. Because I worked for ACS during its downtime, (the time directly following Relay For Life) there wasn’t always a lot of work given to me. But that’s when true PR comes into play. Instead of sitting there and waiting for my next assignment, I used the downtime to think of possible events ACS could do in the fall, something other than Relay For Life that could raise donations. Although my time there was cut short and I was never able to plan an event that stuck, it was the practice and PR exercise that I value today.

Something a little off-subject that comes to mind when discussing internships is one of my good friends Adam Smith, who I graduated from high school with. He is currently a Natural Resource Management volunteer for the United States Peace Corps in Togo, West Africa. Although it might not technically be an internship, I feel that the experience he is gaining there is nothing short of life changing. While thumbing through Facebook one day I came across my old friend’s blog, and decided to take a peek. I found myself sitting at my computer an hour later completely inspired. It was one of those situations where you get so excited about a person’s story that you feel jealous and compelled to make a story of your own. It was kind like, “well he did it, what’s stopping me?” I won’t go into any more detail about it, but if you get a chance it’s a great read with a story-like style to it that leaves you wanting more.