From the Intern Desk: What Did You Do This Summer?

They say you need internships on your resume to get a job (i.e. you need experience to get experience). It’s a baffling, unfortunate paradox that motivated me to hunt down the all-important summer internship last spring. And I got it. So, this summer, when people asked me how my summer was going and I told them I was interning at SyneCore Tech, most responded with a variation of the phrase “Oh, that will look so good on a resume! What a great experience!”

And I can’t argue with them. Coming out of sophomore year and landing a full-time, paid internship in my desired field was pretty rad, and the resume building was a huge bonus.

On my first day, however, I realized how much more this summer was going to be than a “resume-builder.” Right away, I was doing real marketing work, not intern-y marketing work.

For example, instead of just making the coffee, I was Instagram-ing the coffee for our social channels –

(OK, I was still making the coffee, but our CEO does too, so it’s fine).

As summer has progressed, and I sit here in a self-indulgent pool of reflective musings, I’ve realized how much more I’ve gained than a few lines on a document to send to future employers. Here are a few of the big ones:

Take Initiative

While it’s something that I’ve heard industry leaders say time and time again, it’s hard to really understand the idea of “initiative” unless you just do it (props to Nike for pointing this out to all of us years ago).

Initiative doesn’t come from sitting inside your head all-day, thinking about how to be innovative and other sorts of awesome. Taking the initiative means realizing you have an idea and acting on it. Taking the initiative means seeing a potential efficiency and adding some insight to make it better, unconcerned with a false notion of hierarchy. Taking the initiative means spending some extra hours in the office to get another blog done.

I also learned that taking the initiative doesn’t mean that it’s natural for you to publicly voice your opinion. Taking the initiative means that you are motivated by solving problems and getting sh*t done. Moreover, there are no excuses for not taking initiative because you’re not a natural extrovert. Just ask Abe Lincoln.

Have a Voice

There are enough plain-Jane, cookie cutter writers out there, and not enough room for many more. What there is room for, however, are opinionated cheeky writers that aren’t afraid to be a little weird. Just because you might not write in the same style as everyone else doesn’t mean your style won’t resonate with an audience. If you need a little encouragement to let your quirkiness out, Seth Godin’s advice from his talk at #INBOUND13 pretty comforting:

“Now there’s more weird than there is normal. This is the new marketing.”

My inspiration? My colleague Chris Horton – the one who looks to Jedi Master Yoda for inbound marketing advice.

Don’t Over-think Yourself Into a Ball of Nerves

Ok, maybe this is just a personal problem or a problem limited to those over-analyzers, the slightly anxiety-ridden people out there, but it’s a lesson nonetheless. When I first started at SyneCore, I was pretty nervous. There was a lot to learn, as evidenced by some of my thoughts during the first week –

What the hell is inbound marketing?

So ToFu, MoFu, BoFu… those are, like, variations of Asian food, right?

Ahaha – you guys use Google+?

But, within that first week, I was engulfed into an entirely foreign world. I had taken a couple of advertising classes, but I soon realized how little my classroom material reflected the current state of marketing. I was motivated by a sink-or-swim mentality, curious to figure out this whole “integrated digital marketing” thing my colleagues were so jacked about.

That first month was overwhelming, and I spent many a Sunday nights trying to unravel the mystery of Google and outlining potential blogs. Three weeks in, I still found myself frozen every time I sat down to write.

I KNEW NOTHING, I had come to realize. The more I read, the more I realized I didn’t know.

Looking for inspiration, I turned to a quick note I jotted down in one of the many teaching sessions I had.

And then out came “From the Intern Desk: 4 Quick and Dirty Tips to Social Media,” a rather simple post that got some mildly good feedback. I had stopped overthinking everything, and in the process realized this career-changer:

It’s just marketing. We are not, in fact, saving lives.

You don’t have to be so serious all the time, constantly striving for perfection. There are times in the day for stuff like this:

Or this:

Oh, and this:

To many it may look like we’re avoiding “real work” or just messing around, but I learned this summer how important breaks like these are. They remind you to always volunteer to hold the baby visiting the office, eat cake whenever possible and to never fall into the trap of taking yourself too seriously. Ironically, it’s during times like these that we’ve come up with some of our most impactful marketing ideas.

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