Pre-Adulting

Coming into college, I was ready to start on my journalism career. A year in, I decided maybe that wasn’t my passion and found a better way to feed my passion for people and writing through advertising. Now, four years in and about a month away from graduation, I can honestly say the time spent at Temple University has been a great learning experience, especially from this past semester.

In February, I started at Today’s 101.1 More FM, Philadelphia’s top rated radio station, as a promotions/sales intern. As a Senior graduating in May with a Bachelor’s degree in Advertising with a copywriting concentration, it wasn’t my intent to work so closely with digital or social rather than with written copy. But, through classes at Temple like the Google Online Marketing Challenge and my Campaigns capstone course, I’ve realized that the consumer world is quickly changing and advancing. My primary role at the radio station was to take on all things social and digital. I would come into the office three times a week and take a look at the station’s social platforms.

More FM is doing a great job on its Facebook and still growing on Twitter and Instagram. I worked primarily with the Instagram and worked to stay on top of gaining more interactions. Things that worked were captions that posed questions and asked for their followers’ opinions. It was also very important that we were interacting with our followers. This included replying and liking certain comments on our posts. I was also able to find effective photos and visuals to Instagram for the station, and we even ran an intern series every Friday where the three interns: Jack, Sammie and I would embark on a video challenge. We did things like the fear box challenge and spicy noodle challenge. These kind of things were all documented on their Instagram stories.

I like to think I helped make their Instagram stories a bit more visually pleasing for those watching. I don’t know what kind of expectations I had when coming into this internship, but I do know that I was able to gain a lot of knowledge that one can only gain from first hand experience. I had to ask questions, talk to people, and participate in meetings. These all seem like very trivial and easy things, but I’ve gotten so used to that 9AM lecture class culture where you blend into the crowd. More FM only had three interns, everyone in the office knew us and they were all very friendly and interested in the ideas we had to bring to the table. There was no blending in here. We had to assimilate and show the strengths we all had to contribute to this team. This experience has taught me work culture skills. Of course, the physical work that I had to do was a great learning experience, but the need to really step up and participate in creating work for the team was an invaluable experience. This was definitely a transition that needed to happen before I graduated from Temple University, I’m pre-adulting, but now I can say I’m ready to graduate and “adult” on my own.