Overcoming Obstacles and Making Use of Your Time

VS.

I have been interning with the Philadelphia Virtual Academy since January. The goal was to bring in students from competitors and increase enrollment and awareness. I went into the interview with a lot of ideas about what could be done to meet these goals, and was really excited to put them into action once I was hired. However, I hadn’t realized how often you come across obstacles in the process that seem to limit what you can do. As a part of the School District of Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Virtual Academy is sometimes limited in what we can do and there are many roadblocks along the way when it comes to starting something new, such as marketing. At first, we were somewhat put off by the slow-moving process of many tasks, such as gaining approval to create a blog, and then again to upgrade it. We would meet in person once a week, and there were some meetings early on where we felt like we had not accomplished much in the past weeks. However, as the weeks flew by, we realized that though some processes may be slow, we should fill the time with smaller tasks, such as focusing on our Facebook presence, creating an AdWords campaign or designing Direct Mail brochures. While some things may move slowly, we learned that we could still make a lot of progress as these seemingly small tasks added up. Before we knew it, we had not only a list of accomplished tasks, but a whole new inspired list of more things that we could do. From these first couple of slow-moving weeks, we learned the importance of keeping things moving even when they seem to be at a stand-still. This is often what you need in order to get your juices flowing and produce more creative ideas, and it helps pass the time while you wait for the original projects to fall into place!