Summer Internship in NYC ….. 3 months is nothing (1st half of the summer)

Hi Everyone, My first summer internship in New York City, the Mecca of advertising and marketing, is a dream come true for me.  I am extremely thrilled to have gotten this opportunity to learn, network, and build on the skills I have gained through two years of education at Temple Ad department.I feel so lucky to be one of them to work in the heart of city ‘Manhattan.’ Let me tell you more about this company. The company I am interning at is an Indian publication company, publishing a total of three newspapers publications – News India Times (national weekly newspaper), Desi Talk (free edition in New York-New Jersey) and Gujarat Times (in Indian language weekly newspaper) – and one quarterly magazine, The Indo American. I know what you guys must be thinking “Boring” but believe me it was not may be for several reasons and one of the biggest reason was as it is an Indian publication house I could relate to myself more with the environment and people in the office. Let me tell you more about the company. These newspapers caters to the Indians residing in USA. Talking about the jobs and the responsibilities that I was given as an intern were very challenging. My first one and a half months were full of challenges as I was thrown under the marketing sales team who were responsible to bring the revenue in the company; my tasks included were to renew the subscriptions which were not renewed since 2 years and made calls to  each vendor to check for the distributor’s list and believe me it seemed to me impossible. The toughest point in such job is to convert the ratio of pitch into sales. This task of renewing taught me communicating skills in sales department and I have learnt that  renewing the old customers is more tougher than to convert first time (buyer) customer. I was not only successful in getting back the old customers but also got some new leads through them and made a sale of around $750-$900 (which is a very good start as an intern) One advise I would like to give over here is (Rule of Thumb) do your homework (study the company and it’s history very well; in this case how old is the publication and what is the content) before you start with any kind of challenge, or work at the office and do not get bored with anything and everything that is given to you as an intern. Also do not think ‘I am an advertising student and this is not what I am here for.’ These kind of tasks are thrown at you to test your abilities at work to see whether you fit in the environment or not.