Inhale Confidence, Exhale Doubt

My name is Ifetayo Jabari-Kitwala. I am a junior Advertising major with a Brand Strategy and Research concentration. I currently work as a Marketing and Media Intern for Vim Collaborative. Vim Collaborative is a small consulting firm that focuses on storytelling and building brands for those in an educational sphere. Over the semester, much of my work has been focused on Revolution School, a brand new high school focused on breaking down the wall between learning and living. I work with my supervisors to create a social media action plan or a brand awareness campaign with in goal to increase followers and interactivity on all of the social media platforms that they use. 

Coming into this new space, I was excited to learn more about marketing and the vast use of media from a company’s perspective. A majority of my experience has come from non-profit organizations or student organizations on Temple University’s campus. Working with this company, taught me a few things about the educational industry, myself and where I want to go next. Education is evolving. Although it is not at such an exponential rate as technology or biology, it has its own set of eurekas. Those you hope to serve and how you serve them must constantly be adjusted based off of the social climate and Vim Collaborative helped me see that by allowing me to conduct research on neighborhood and their resources on my own and report to them my own findings. They guided me instead of micro-managed me. 

It was a scary experience at first. Having to travel off campus to the 17th floor of an important building in Center City, Philadelphia added this pressure to the experience. I saw the biggest impact of this in the first few weeks of my internship. I was only there for a few hours, three days a week. In our sessions, they would ask me my opinion on an aspect of a project they were working on. I slouched and I told them what I thought they wanted to hear, without adding any additional insight or contradiction, even if I had one. I had the idea that an intern was supposed to obey. Instead, they encouraged me to stand firm in my differing opinions and trust the foundation that I had built from my past experiences.  

Although I came in with a decent foundation, the simple idea of having an internship allowed me to take more pride in my work. It wasn’t just another assignment, it was a job, a responsibility. Having this internship taught how to make almost anything into business attire and it doesn’t take that much effort to care about how you look, going to the office, so you should. Having this internship, sharpened my self-starting habits. I had an opportunity to propose ideas and projects to my supervisors and sometimes they said no and redirected; but that is okay. 

I am happy to announce that I will be continuing to work for this company next semester for the chance to dive deeper into my current projects and develop new ones. If I didn’t have this internship as the place where I made mistakes and grew from them, I wouldn’t have been able to feel confident going into an Interview Super-Day for Bank of America and securing the position within 24 hours. I plan to take each piece of advice given as if it’s the only advice I ever hear because although I have some background in this field, you can never stop searching for innovation solutions to recurrent problems. Thank-you Vim Collaborative for teaching me that.