LINK Internship
LINK Description:
LINK, an acronym for Leading Internships for New Knowledge, is an internship program that all juniors at Animas High School participate in. For three weeks, each student works with a mentor in the real world, gaining experience in professional work environments. From travelling to major cities, observing surgery, and even playing music, students are exposed to a wide variety of experiences. Each student picks their own internship, so they get an experience that is catered to their interests. Ideally, students get an idea of either what they are interested in and what they would like to pursue late in life or, just as valuably, what they would not.
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Business Description
I conducted my internship with the La Plata County Economic Development Alliance. The Economic Development Alliances partners with businesses both inside and outside of La Plata County in an attempt to bolster the local economy. The Alliance performs a variety of duties and services including providing information to businesses about the status of the local economy, establishing connections and contacts for individuals, and even helping the spouses of newly hired Durangoans find employment. Every year, the Alliance hosts the Economic Summit, which is essentially the largest business conference in Southwest Colorado. The Economic Summit was what my project and the majority of my internship work was based around.
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LINK Project
My LINK project dealt with the Economic Summit that will take place in October of this year. The economic summit is one of the largest business conferences in Southwest Colorado. The theme of the Summit this year is ‘Leadership: the Power of Us’, and is all about how collaboration and partnership can help to strengthen businesses and the economy and community as a whole. My project was for myself and my internship, but it also was for the Economic Development Alliance. For my project, I interviewed several local business leaders and used the footage to create promotional videos for the Summit. I interviewed Ed Zink, the owner of Mountain Bike Specialists and one of the founders of the Iron Horse Bicycle Classic, Dave Thibodeau, the president and founder of Ska Brewing, and Mark Thompson, the owner and founder of Phoenix Recycling. My work on the project was extremely independent and took up almost the entirety of the last two weeks of the internship. The interviews were each about 45 minutes long and went into depth about how each of the business leaders had My responsibilities included gathering all of the necessary equipment and software, reaching out and scheduling times with each of the interviewees, formulating questions to ask that correlated with the theme, traveling to each location and conducting each interview, and then editing the footage into short clips. From over two hours of total footage, I created 12 clips of varying length that will be used for promotional marketing, to give potential speakers at the event an impression of the theme, and possibly even integrated in some way to the summit itself.
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LINK Anticipation and Preparation |
LINK Reflection |
The first thing I did when looking for an internship was to figure out the fields I was interested in. I narrowed down my interests to law, government, journalism, economics, and PR/marketing. After contacting variety of local businesses from the aforementioned fields, I was referenced to Heather Otter at the La Plata County Economic Development Alliance by Elizabeth Marsh at SCAPE. After meeting with Heather, we decided to move forward with the internship and continued on to organize a project, schedule, etc. One of the most challenging things for me was a lack of success in even finding people who had the capacity to bring on an intern. In total, I reached out to 7 different local businesses before finding my internship. This was tough for me because every business I contacted were extremely positive and friendly, many even remarked how impressed they were with my professionalism and the content of my resume as a mere high school student, but they all eventually said that they didn’t have the capacity or ability to bring on an intern at that time. Some of the companies were a maybe for a while, which actually hindered my process because I didn’t reach out to others during the periods of their consideration because I didn’t want to have to rescind my inquiry after the fact for any companies. Thankfully I eventually found my internship because I was low on time and needed something to have as internship, and it just so happens that the internship I ended up landing seems intriguing. For me, there wasn’t much choice in which internship I picked, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t glad that I got the internship that I got. I ended up choosing this internship because I was low on time to find the perfect/ideal internship, but also because I thought it would be good internship to include on a resume/college application, because it would be a good opportunity to complete some meaningful and potentially interesting work, and because it would be a great learning experience on professionalism, entrepreneurship, and business in general. I hope to be exposed to a professional work environment and some of the interesting work done at this particular non-profit. As detailed above, I think this internship will help me to understand more of what work they do and how it benefits the community as a whole. Because part of my internship will involve sitting in on meetings and sessions with SCAPE businesses, I will also get the chance to learn about how companies start up and become independent. Through interning at La Plata County Economic Development Alliance, I think that I will get a much better idea of what it takes to start, run, and grow a business, as well as simultaneously gaining valuable work experience. I hope that I can bring a perspective that is fresh and with experience in technology that is able to meet their needs. I think that I have a solid work ethic and the experience that will allow me to work well on the video project for the economic summit. I think that the work I do for my project will have the most lasting impact from my internship. Because my project is a project for the company rather than a project for myself, it will hopefully leave a mark and help them out in the future. My project is to conduct video interviews and create video clips for the Alliance’s Economic Summit in October. I hope that this work will give the Alliance a better idea of how they can market their event and add additional depth to it.
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My internship was a bit of a mixed bag; the topics I was learning about and types of work I was doing wasn’t super interesting to me, but some of my experiences were still very beneficial. For me, the specifics of economic development and the economic summit weren’t very interesting or engaging, but the work I did for my LINK project taught me a lot. My LINK project was creating short videos, gathered from long interviews with local business leaders, and it was very independent. The independence I was endowed with for the project led to a lot more pressure, but along with the pressure came a lot more effort, investment, and, ultimately, benefit. I think that my independent work ended up saving my LINK experience and teaching me a lot about myself, my work habits, and skills for the future. Some of the skills that I was extremely thankful to already have for my internship and project surrounded technology. For conducting video interviews, I was grateful to have access to the proper gear and the knowledge of how to operate it. This skill and equipment allowed me to drastically improve my project by creating videos with high quality audio, video, and all-around high production value. During the course of the internship there were definitely challenges and times of stress, but these were also some of the most effective learning experiences for me, both in terms of skills and knowledge. For instance, the first week was fairly rough for me because there wasn’t really much of anything going on and the work I was doing was incredibly dull. However, from this experience I learned a bit about some of the future work that I am not interested in pursuing and I also learned that I am very adaptable; it has been my observation that when returning to school, starting a new job or internship, or any sudden change in lifestyle, responsibility, or work, I am able to quickly get used to it and do my best. I also learned that work that is independent and results in a tangible product can be a good format for me to work. The independence and pressure put on me was also a huge motivator at times -- during the final week, I had to conduct two of my three interviews, one of which was on Thursday, which resulted in a lot of crunch time in the final week and days of my internship. The timing was not even a result of procrastination, it was a result of schedule availability of the interviewees, so I simply had to accept the realities of my situation, and I did. I also developed a lot of skills surrounding video editing. I had a week to edit the clips from the first interview, three days for the second, and only one day for the last interview, so I had to move quickly and edit efficiently. Because I was using a completely new software to me, I had to teach myself how to perform all the necessary functions, and each and every interview my process was streamlined and improved, leading me to feel confident in my abilities to create videos in the future. Another skill I had to develop was about professional communication. There were plenty of times that I was in unfamiliar and uncomfortable social situations that I had to adapt to. Especially during the first week, I wasn’t very assertive and I didn’t communicate with my mentor as well as I could have in terms of asking questions and seeking clarification. However, as time passed I realized I needed to communicate in order to be a successful and truly helpful intern, so I gradually became more comfortable and it was much less of an issue. As part of my project, I had to personally reach out to each of the business leaders that I was going to interview in order to gauge their willingness and setup a time and location to meet at. For me, this was a bit difficult at first because the idea of just calling a person with some title out of the blue and asking if they were willing to do an interview on video seemed foreign and awkward. But I had no other option and it ended up working out in the end -- teaching me that it’s okay to initiate and contact someone of importance, just as long as it is done professionally with a respect for the person and their time. There were definitely things I learned and skills I developed that resulted in me gaining quite a bit from my internship, but I think my mentor and the organization I interned with gained quite a bit as well. My project ended up creating a product that I will use to showcase some of my work from the internship, but it will also have a large role in the Economic Development Alliance’s Economic Summit conference in October. The clips that I ended up creating from the hours of interview footage will be used for promotional marketing of the event on the Alliance’s social media and newsletters, it will be shown to speakers and presenters of the event to bestow them with an idea of what the theme for the event, and it will possibly be integrated into the event itself. Because of this, I think I played an important role and gave a valuable service to the organization I interned with. In all honesty, I think that I gained some skills and knowledge from my internship, but it doesn’t feel like it had any effect on my plans for the future. It didn’t exactly spark my interest as something that I want to pursue in the future, and it felt like community-based economic development was too niche of a field to really consciously avoid. However, I am still taking action that does leave my options open and prepare me for some of the possible careers and educational routes that I am interested in. This summer, I am spending three weeks in Colorado Springs for a Pre-College program at Colorado College, one of the colleges I am planning on applying to. In essence, I stay in the dorms and take a class about ancient politics and I get to earn college credit for it. I am also potentially taking a concurrent enrollment class next year. I was accepted and I have a meeting with an advisor next. Even though my plans for the future were not altered by my internship, I think there were still lessons I learned and it is not an experience I will forget anytime soon.
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