Kaiya Boll – Media & Communications Internship

My name is Kaiya Boll, and I am the Media and Communications intern in the ELANCO district office under Mr. Justin Johnson. Through this internship, I am learning about solidifying a business’s brand on social media, as well as all the work that goes into maintaining positive relationships between the school and the general community.

My typical day starts with checking emails on the social media account and looking at the content calendar to see if there is any social media content that needs to go out for that week. If there is, I will work on either finding a template from a previous social media post that I can adapt or I develop the post from scratch. I then submit and schedule the posts to go out. One of my larger social media projects is the alumni spotlight series, where I reach out to Garden Spot alumni to feature them on social media, the district website, and in the district newsletter.

Right now, my two main priorities are generating social media content and working on the ELANCO district newsletter. We have decided to center the fall edition of the newsletter around the Brave the Dark movie that was filmed in our school, and we want to tie in GSPA as well for a theater-centered newsletter. I am helping with research for the movie article, and have already gotten information about GSPA and interviews from students for the GSPA spotlight. I am additionally responsible for using survey responses from new staff members to write short paragraphs that introduce them to the community. There are other aspects I have helped with as well, such as information for the high school program spotlight, formatting the list of upcoming events in the district calendar, and repurposing information from the alumni spotlight responses to fit into the newsletter.

This internship has taught me to be able to work more independently on bigger projects and to take initiative on issues I do not always have clear instructions for. The environment in the office can be fast-paced, and I do not always have time to be questioning everything- sometimes done is better than perfect. I also have learned a lot about the importance of controlling the narrative and how the public perceives us as both a school and a brand. While there are some problems within our school that create negative discourse, there are also a lot of interesting and positive things happening in our district- and those are the things we want to highlight to the public. As far as pursuing marketing in the future, I really enjoy the work I have gotten to do thus far, and it has made me more interested in pursuing a career in the English field or something related to communications and writing.