Jack Of All Trades

My name is Chris Currie, and I will be a senior advertising major with a concentration in media planning this fall. For this summer semester I interned at BLENDi, which is an up-and-coming company that specializes in on-the-go, portable blenders. 

For BLENDi, being a small start-up, there aren’t many employees in the advertising and marketing department. Actually, I should correct myself. There are not any other employees at all. The whole show is run by my boss, and leaves much of the marketing business to his 3 interns. While it may seem like a large task to basically run an entire company’s marketing, doing it for a small company really lets you get creative with things, and it provides great experience, as I feel like I am simultaneously one of the heads of marketing, but also still feel like an intern who is gaining more and more experience daily.

With this mixed feeling of being at the top and the bottom of the company, there are a lot of different experiences and things that I have learned. One of the most important things that I learned was to be more open-minded about things that I don’t have a lot of experience with. Being in the media planning concentration, I was expecting to mostly use things like Google Ads, which is something I have a basic understanding of. However, as the main sources for marketing and advertising, the interns were performing tasks that I never even thought of, making each of us a “Jack of all trades.” We made graphics for Instagram posts, reached out to influencers for potential brand deals, and wrote blog posts using keywords to attract new customers. While these tasks don’t necessarily align with my desired concentration, I think the diversity in doing such different types of things really will help me in the future, and will be especially useful in finding a job that could require me to do something similar. Of course, I also used lots of skills that were very beneficial to my concentration, such as the already mentioned Google Ads and a platform called Klaviyo for email campaigns. Even finding keywords for the blog was useful, but the overall experience of doing it all for a company that small is something that I think will be very important.

The small number of people working at BLENDi gave me a great chance to work with the other interns, and I think it also helped strengthen my ability to work in a team. While I’ve worked in teams before for other jobs and in classes, working in the advertising branch of a company is a whole different beast. Since there were only three interns, we all had to do a lot of work in order to get things right, but it was also easier to meet with and work together. In high school and even in college, there is a certain stereotype about group projects: there are the people who do nothing, the people who don’t do enough, the people who do everything the night before, and the people who just do the entire project on their own. Doing projects in the past, I almost always experienced at least one of these stereotypes from another group member. But in a group like this, we all had similar — but not the exact same — backgrounds, and we all had different things to bring to the table. It was easy to collaborate and work together on projects that would potentially have been tough to work on by ourselves, and that was one of my favorite parts about working for BLENDi. While one person may specialize in media planning, they may struggle in graphic design. Because of this, we would all work together on posts for Instagram to make them cohesive and match with each other. Some of us may be good at researching, while others may not be, so we would do research together and explain to each other what needed to be done next. Being in such a small group with such an important role has really shown me how far teamwork can get you.

To end my blog, I would like to comment on the fact that my internship being entirely remote was a big factor in making it successful for me. BLENDi’s main headquarters is in Boston, which on its own would be an issue for someone living in South Jersey. However, with the internship being online, people from New Jersey, Michigan, and California could all collaborate remotely for a company based in Massachusetts. We used Google Meet to communicate, answer questions, and have meetings, which was great. While I do have experience working at an office in person, I think the remote aspect was an especially important part of this internship, and I hope many internships like this one stay remote in future, so collaboration can happen all across the country.

I can’t say that the internship I had was easy. It really wasn’t. Working many hours a day in completely different fields was tiring, and it was sometimes hard to keep up with everything. However, I am extremely happy with the experience I have gained from my internship, and am looking forward to using it at a job in the future!