My Experience as Social Media Intern at Temple’s Criminal Justice Department
My name is Maria and I am a junior studying Advertising with a concentration in Art Direction at Temple University. My career interests include events, advertising, design and social media. This semester, I worked as the first ever Social Media Intern for the Criminal Justice Department at Temple. Prior to my arrival, the department never had a social media intern and had a very low profile in terms of social media presence, with only a Twitter page. In my position, I started to take over the Twitter page and also created a Facebook and Instagram page for the department, highlighting upcoming events, doing media coverage of said events, posting spotlights of faculty/students/alumni, posting about special courses and much more.
The biggest event we had this semester was the Criminal Justice Career Fair. I attended planning meetings, did a social media series of sharing employers attending, kept sharing the event info. on all our platforms and did live media coverage at the actual event. Some other things I performed in this role were designing graphics for the Instagram story highlights and flyers for Special Topics and Capstone courses. I came up with weekly Instagram posts and hashtags such as #TempleMadeMondays highlighting student successes and #FacultySpotlightFridays to show our professors and their current areas of study/books being written/awards.
This role has taught me a lot and it has been an incredibly positive experience. For one, I’ve always been attracted to social media (clearly), but I now have a better understanding of how to use social media as a professional marketing tool. I now better know how to reach a large number of people, be personable and draw them into what is being talked about, even if they are not primarily a Criminal Justice Student. I was able to better engage the Criminal Justice student body and also reach other Temple students not in the major.
Being someone who has very little knowledge about Criminal Justice, through this role I’ve also gained so much respect for a subject so different from what I am studying, and am grateful to help a department that was in need of someone with a creative personality. This internship was everything I expected, because I was able to have freedom with my decisions for the whole social media plan, and deem it successful. I also was fortunate enough to meet with the lead social media manager from Temple’s College of Liberal Arts, where Criminal Justice resides. She taught me wonderful and effective strategies for managing social media and marketing tactics, which I carried over into my position. I was able to help a department thrive in an area unfamiliar to reach more people and better engage the university body.
