Finally made it!

My name is Amy and I am an Advertising major at the Klein College of Media and Communications. I made the decision at the age of 27 years old to get my college degree and embarked on a journey that would eventually end up here, at the American College of Physicians (ACP). I walked in May with the rest of my class and will graduate this August after the completion of my credited internship. However, it was not a road easily traveled. Along the way I had to work a full time job to support myself, in addition to dealing with an ailing parent among many other responsibilities. I have to be honest, there were times I wanted to give up and wasn’t sure I could make it through what ended up being seven years. Because of the demanding schedule I had during the school year, I wasn’t able to work as many internships as I would have liked. I am happy to say that working hard and applying myself to the curriculum, I was able to graduate magna cum laude and land what I consider to be an amazing internship at the American College of Physicians.

Established in 1921, the ACP is a national not for profit organization made up of internists. They are the largest medical-specialty organization, and second-largest physician group in the United States. The ACP is made up of 152,000 members including internists, internal medicine sub specialists, medical students, residents, and fellows. There are many various print and digital publications that make up the ACP. During this internship I worked in the publishing department, specifically for their most popular publication, Annals of Internal Medicine. 

During my time at this internship, I learned so many additional tools and put into practice things that we touched on in the classroom at Temple. I was able to use customer relationship marketing (CRM) platforms like Salesforce, and worked on their vendor Silverchair’s platform Sitemaster. I learned a lot about IP addresses as well as touched on coding. I learned the back end of live and dead pages and assisted in lending a hand in the build out of their new multi-media page that will feature their new podcast. I spent this past week learning how to build a dashboard on Google Analytics and analyze the Annals.org website.

Coming from an Advertising major, it was interesting working in a new field that encompassed the tools that I had learned in the classroom in addition to new tools I learned during my time in this field. I was fortunate to have a great mentor, Bernie, who was more than happy to share his knowledge that he had acquired all of these years in the industry. He had come from a strong marketing background where he had worked high up with companies like Comcast and the Philadelphia Seventy Sixers. He would spend hours sharing CRM presentations that he had put together during the time he had worked with the Seventy Sixers. He shared interview skills and possible questions they might ask and gave me first hand scenarios, like when he applied to Comcast and landed the job. I sat in on every meeting they had with the publishing department as well as meetings where other departments such as marketing, advertising, and public relations were present. Listening to the executives dialogue, I followed along as KPI’s were tossed around the room and discussions of print, display and banner ads were presented in PowerPoint.

This internship surpassed my expectations in the amount of new tools that I learned. I am happy that I worked in a department that wasn’t specifically what I went to school for, but had so much cross-over. It taught me how important it is to continue to expand not only on what you’re current knowledge is, but also on the other departments that you will be working with. On one project, I had to look at a digital advertisement on the Annal’s website in different dimensions and on different devices to see if adding copy above it would push the ad out of view on the landing page. I was able to use Google Analytics to find data on the websites dimensions and devices and use an online resource to plug in the landing page and size it up in the different dimensions. We came to the conclusion that the advertisement would be out of view too great of a time and that it couldn’t run when the additional copy was there. What one department does directly influences and affects other departments.

My biggest advice during an internship is pay attention. Listen to what everyone is saying and take it in. You are getting this incredible opportunity to learn from individuals that have such as vast amount of experience in their fields. Fields that they have worked in before the digital presence we have today. They have grown and adapted and really know their stuff. As much as we have learned at our time at Temple, now is the chance to watch it live out right before our own eyes. I enjoyed this internship and will take everything I have learned with me. I would like to hopefully get a job working in a pharmaceutical advertising agency and I am sure this internship will bode well for me in that respect. That being said, I am a very social person and working in publishing is more of a task oriented field. Knowing my personality and my years working full time in a sales field, I would like to move into a field that is more focused on customer relations. Every experience you have in life makes you a more well rounded individual and having interned for the ACP has done exactly that for me. I am excited to see what the future holds and what is in store for me at the end of this long traveled road!