Avery Stauffer – Marketing & Journalism Internship

My name is Avery Stauffer and this semester I am interning at Garden Spot Village with their Marketing/Creative team. In the future, I am planning on pursuing a career in marketing, so this internship is an amazing opportunity for me to see what is involved in day-to-day tasks and activities. At Garden Spot Village I work alongside my mentor, Juanita Fox (director of media experiences/storyteller) as well as the graphic designer Brandon Adams and web designer/photographer Gavin Sauder.

A typical week at my internship involves writing blog posts, observing meetings, interviewing residents, writing articles for the Garden Variety, proofreading, and planning/writing Facebook posts. Occasionally I will help set up for video shoots or observe the editing process for video interviews. Most of the meetings I observe are discussions about website changes or analyzing the data from hiring ad campaigns. It is very fascinating to see the creative process that may start in a brainstorming meeting and then continue through small projects and coordination from different departments eventually leading to a product like Garden Spot Village’s Destination magazine. Currently, I am working on an article for Destination and am planning to start a second one shortly. Through that process, I will send my articles to a copy editor and work with them to get my story finalized and ready to go for the fall edition of Destination.

I am very excited about the opportunity that this internship has been so far. While this is not the exact job I am planning on pursuing in the future, I am learning a lot of new storytelling and writing techniques that will be very useful in the coming years. It’s a great experience to learn this new style of writing since a majority of my high school classes have strictly taught academic writing. I also get to experience a professional work environment first-hand as well as develop and clarify my communication skills. These skills are regularly put into practice since I do a lot of writing and interviewing each week.

Overall, I would recommend doing an internship even if you are not 100% sure about your career goals because you will learn a lot of new skills that are learned through experience rather than a classroom setting.  This opportunity has really helped me verify which aspects of marketing I love and which aspects I do not prefer. This will help me choose a specific marketing concentration since it is such a large umbrella of careers.