How My Internship Experience Opened My Mind Up to New Possibilities

Hello everyone! I’m Sean Brassil and I am a social media intern at Group Two. I wanted to share some of my experience interning there and how it compared to my expectations. I’ve been here for about 5 months and it’s been an awesome learning experience and gave me the opportunity to meet incredible people. Most importantly, it’s opened my mind up to new possibilities that I did not think I would be interested in.

Group Two is a full-service agency that specializes in marketing solutions for home builders. Despite HGTV being my guilty pleasure, I couldn’t help but wonder if I would enjoy working in an agency where all of the clients were focused in one industry. I worried that the work would quickly become repetitive, and that focusing just on one market would grow tiring. However, I quickly discovered that one of the great things about the advertising industry is that while the product may be the same, the way you can sell it is different. Managing social media profiles made me appreciate the differences between each client’s brand based on what I posted and how the audience of each page differed. Realizing that the work I would do on each client is different and fulfilling, I now know that agencies with a specific focus can still have incredible diversity in regard to work that must be done. I’ve also come to see the benefits of a niche agency. Being involved in one industry is good, because when clients are having a problem, it likely isn’t the first time we’ve encountered it. It also means I can get an in-depth understanding of the industry to fully understand what exactly our clients do, and where advertising can come in to help them.

This experience has been invaluable to me, it has reinforced the fact that I shouldn’t make assumptions on what I will and won’t like about something before I even try it, which is especially important as I approach graduation in less than a year. I would also encourage anybody who is looking for their first internship, who feels they have a set an idea of what they want in an agency to instead experiment! Being able to experience what working in an agency specialized in one market helped me set aside any lingering questions I had about what agency life would be like when working in a specific market, and opened up my mind to working at one when I graduate.