Doing Good with my Degree

 

Coming into graduate school and throughout this experience, I have always envisioned that after completing my degree, I would want to use my skills and experience in the sports industry or the nonprofit sector. 

As I near the end of my grad school journey, I still envision myself using my skills in one of these industries, but what I really want to do is use my degree to make a difference in peoples’ lives and I am even more inspired to do this work after my experiences during this semester. 

In my Communication and Social Change class, we have talked about social change campaigns that have influenced change on many issues, ranging from animal cruelty to education issues to sexual assault and so many more.  My professor for this class is very passionate about this area of communication work, which has made this class super interesting and has inspired me to want to do this kind of work in some way!  In this class, our semester-long project has been to put together a communication campaign to combat a social change issue of our choice.  Over the last two weeks, my classmates and I presented our topics and everyone in my class has shined a light on so many different issues…some of which I never knew about.  I knew my own topic, which is the low literacy reading rates among low income youth in the United States, was an issue, but didn’t understand how prevalent the problem was until I started researching the issue for the project. 

My internship at Everybody Wins DC has also inspired me.  Getting to see and hear directly from mentors and students about how their experience in the organization’s Power Lunch program has left a lasting impression on me!  Throughout my internship, I have been able to share stories and quotes from these mentors and students about how this program has directly impacted their lives and share them on Everybody Wins DC’s social media platforms.  One student was so excited about reading with her mentor that she said called it “funner than recess!”  Another student said she will always think of her mentors when she reads and re-reads a book that she picked out at one of our book distribution events.  It happens to be the next book in a series that she has been reading with her mentors.  These stories just warm my heart!

I hope that wherever my career takes me, whether if it’s in the sports industry, in the nonprofit world or maybe some other field, that I am able to make a positive impact on people!

Back to the Intern Life

This semester I am taking a step back and doing another internship as a Communications Intern at Everybody Wins DC to add to my experience.  Everybody Wins DC is a youth literacy and mentoring non-profit in Washington DC.  They pair up working professionals who spend one hour per week reading with elementary school students in DC.  It is rewarding to get experience with an organization that works for a cause that I am very passionate about.  I am a self-proclaimed bookworm and have loved to read since I was a little kid. 

As an intern in the communications department, I have created content and graphics for their social media platforms, done some writing and editing for their website and created a content calendar for the department. 

I have also helped out with projects for their Programs department as well.  Because I don’t really have any experience working in non-profits, it is nice to be exposed to other departments within a non-profit organization.  Everybody Wins DC does monthly book distributions at each of their partner schools where each student in the program gets to pick out a book and add it to their personal collection.  This past week, I helped go through books that have been donated and box them up for each of the schools.  They even had a copy of my favorite book from my childhood, The Cricket in Times Square by George Selden, so I made sure to include a copy of that book in one of the boxes for the schools! 

I also spent some time at a few of the schools during their mentor orientations at the beginning of the school year to learn more about the program and also take pictures to use on the website and social media platforms.  Before my internship is over, I will also go to the schools to talk to some of the mentors and students to get some stories to share about the organization.

Taking a step back and doing another internship after working for several years has been a humbling experience.  I have tried to soak in this experience and learn from everyone that works at Everybody Wins DC and observe how a non-profit organization is run.  While I knew going in to this internship that I would be interested in working for a non-profit, this experience has definitely solidified my interest in working in this industry after graduation.

One Semester To Go...

The first two weeks of fall semester are now behind me and it has definitely been an eventful couple of weeks (and it has nothing to do with school).

I am finishing up my final two classes for my degree this semester – Writing for Strategic Communication and Communication for Social Change.  Both classes start at 8:20am, so getting up early has been a little difficult, but being finished by 11am is very nice!

My first class on Monday is Writing for Strategic Communication.  It is the final of the four core classes required for my degree.  I was originally supposed to take this class last fall, but dropped it in order to have a more manageable course load last year.  Throughout the semester, we will be writing different communication pieces and then will put together a final project based on an organization of our choice.

On Tuesdays, I have my Communication for Social Change class, which is my final elective required for my degree.  Unfortunately, I did not make it to class the first week because my car got rear-ended on the way to campus.  So instead of being in class, I spent the day talking to my car insurance, getting my car towed, getting a rental car, etc.  Luckily, I have a classmate from last year who is in my class and I was able to find out what I missed in class.  Being the first class, I didn’t miss much except introductions, going over the syllabus and talking about our semester-long project that we will be working on during the class.  I am looking forward to this class because throughout the semester we will be working on a communication campaign for a social change issue of our choice. Mine will probably be connected to a youth literacy issue.

This semester will be different from my experience in grad school last year.  Other than the few classmates in my Tuesday class that I know from last year, it is a whole new group of students in my Monday class.  It was weird going to that class and not knowing any of the other students because they are all in the new cohort for the Strategic Communication program.  Like in my cohort, there is a mix of students -  some coming straight out of undergrad, some that have worked for several years before going back to school and also some who are currently working and going to school part-time. 

I will also be spending less time on campus this semester since I only have one class each on Monday and Tuesday mornings.  That will obviously allow me to have more time for my other commitments that I have this semester.  Although, I do hope to get to campus for a few events and speakers throughout the semester if the timing works with my schedule.

While I only have two classes this semester, the remainder of my time will be spent working a few days per week at Barnes & Noble and also completing an internship at Everybody Wins! DC.  They are a DC area children’s literacy non-profit organization (more about that in an upcoming post).

Like last year, one of my biggest challenges will be managing my time between classes, work and the internship and also taking time for myself and focusing on things outside of school and work.  I will spend a decent amount of time on Metro, so I hope to get a good amount of reading for pleasure done.  Because I am attending a university in DC, I am able to swim at any of the DC parks and recreation aquatic centers for free using my student ID, so of course I will continue to take advantage of that!  There is a nice indoor pool across the street from the Metro station near campus (and they even have the pool set up for long course a few days per week)!

Finding My Creative Side...

The original plan for the summer was to have an internship and take one class.  Of course, the best laid plans never work out, so I am taking two classes instead.  Both classes are very different from the ones that I have taken during my time in this program so far.  While the classes up to this point have mostly been focused on writing, the elective classes I am taking this summer are more focused on learning digital communications skills.

I am taking a Visual Strategies in Public Relations class where we learn about different design principles and techniques and then apply them to the projects that we have worked on throughout the class.  Each project is related to a fictional organization that we came up with at the beginning of the class.  My business is an independent children’s bookstore in Washington DC.  Our first project was to create a logo for our company.

We also designed a booklet and are now creating a web story related to our company.  Throughout the class, we have used several Adobe Creative Suite programs for our projects.  Prior to the class, I had used InDesign, but had not used Illustrator or Photoshop before.  These are programs that I had always wanted to learn, so it has been fun to experiment with them and build some skills that will only help me as I start out on this new career path.  

This class has also challenged me to be more creative.  I never had any experience doing visual design and was a little intimidated when the class first started.  After only a month in this class, I have become a lot more comfortable using these programs and have enjoyed flexing my creative muscles in doing some design.

I am also taking a Web Development class. This is a completely new skill for me and learning to code is basically like learning a whole new language.  Luckily, we have a good book that breaks down each step and there are also some good online resources as well.  This class is online, so we have used a few different coding tutorial websites to learn the basics and then have several assignments to complete each week.  For our final project, I am creating a website about my favorite places that I have traveled to in the US.  While I don’t see myself ever working in a job where I am just creating websites, I am glad that I took this class to at least learn the basics of how to code websites.

Taking two classes in one summer session has been pretty intense.  It is basically doing a semester’s worth of classwork in just six weeks and then multiplying that by two classes.  It’s been A LOT of work, but it will be nice to be done at the end of next week and then have a break from classes until the fall semester.

Goodbye Spring Semester

And just like that spring semester is over.  I finished up final projects earlier this week and it feels so good to be done! 

 

My finals for the semester consisted of a final project in each of two my classes and finishing up my capstone research project. 

 

In my Social Media Strategies class, our final project was to create a digital media plan for a client.  My group created a plan for Better Homes & Gardens.  The project was more than just planning what media platforms to use and creating content for those platforms.  It involved doing a lot of research about the demographics of the magazine’s readers, internet search topics and hashtags related to the magazine, etc. 

 

Overall this class was a lot different than I expected it to be.  I thought we would spend a lot of time learning how to compose social media posts, but the majority of the class was learning about SEO (search engine optimization), different tactics to use for creating social media and tools to use for looking at social media trends and analyzing social media use and data. 

 

Our final project in my Sports Communication class was to create a marketing and communications plan for a sports apparel product, event or company.  My group created a plan for a new line of basketball shoes and incorporated a charity/community event into the overall plan as well.    Throughout this entire class, we were able to be very creative with our project ideas and I liked that every assignment was very practical.

 

Heading into the last week of working on my capstone, I only had the final two sections to write and felt like I was in a good place with it and was not too stressed about it. However, I did struggle a little bit over the last few days because of not being completely sure about how to write one of the final sections of the paper.  Once I did finish the writing and editing, I was very reluctant to email the final paper to my professor.  I think it was because I had worked so hard on it and I kept wanting to go over it and make sure it was the best work I could turn in.  Although, once I hit that send button, I felt relieved and felt a great sense of accomplishment for writing a 40+ page paper!

 

Now I am looking forward to a few weeks off before starting my summer classes!

Capstone Project...

Spring semester has been all about working on my capstone project.  As I mentioned in a previous post, I will be looking at how sports teams use social media to engage with their fans and build their team’s brand for this project.  For the actual research portion of the project, I am doing a content analysis of MLB team tweets during 2017.  While the topic is obviously very interesting to me, it is a little daunting to be in the process of writing a 30+ page research paper. 

I started this project in the fall during my Communication Theory and Communication Research classes.  I wrote a literature review for my final paper in theory and looked at the current literature about how and why sports teams use social media.  There is no shortage of sources on the topic and that made writing the literature review an easier process. I also wrote my research proposal on the same topic as what my capstone project would be…a Twitter content analysis study of MLB team tweets.

Already having a chunk of my paper written at the beginning of this semester has given me more time to work on gathering the data for the research portion of the project.

The first step of the research part was to collect tweets from 2017 for all 30 teams.  The process was very tedious and I spent countless hours in the evenings and on the weekends sitting in front of my computer gathering all these tweets.

Coding tweets has been just as big of a task and just as tedious as collecting the tweets.  I was hoping to be able to code tweets from all 30 teams, but will probably only be able to code tweets from 8-10 teams because of time constraints for the project.  I knew that teams were very active on social media, but I did not realize how much they tweeted over the course of one year.  Of the teams, that I have looked at, they have each sent out between 5,000 – 12,000 tweets in one year.  I am coding every 100^th tweet, so that has been a lot of tweets to go through and code!

To analyze these tweets, I created a coding sheet that consists of different themes or content areas to look for in each tweet.  These questions range from whether the tweet includes an image or video, how many likes/tweets/replies each tweet gets and the general content of the tweet.

I had about 10-12 pages of this project already written prior to this semester and have gone through a couple of drafts already this semester.  It has been mostly adding on to what I already have written and editing it as I go.  My capstone professor has seen each and every draft of this paper now since he was also my professor for both my research and theory classes last semester.

The writing process for this paper has been challenging for me.  Every time I sit down in front of my computer, I seem to get writers block and have a hard time getting any writing done.  But as soon as I am doing something else, that’s when all my ideas come to me.

I am now down to crunch time with this project with only about a month left of the semester.  These last few weeks will be dedicated to writing the results and discussion section and doing more editing and re-writing of this project.  Wish me luck!

Spring Semester Is Flying By...

And just like that, spring semester is already more than halfway over.  This semester has brought a different set of challenges than fall semester.  While I spent most of the fall re-acclimating myself to being back in school and figuring out how grad school worked, spring semester has been more about adjusting to a new class and work schedule and starting to focus on my internship search for the summer.

Having evening classes is still a challenge for me.  My days are longer now with working at my graduate assistantship during the day and then trying to squeeze in some homework throughout the day before having class in the evening.  By the time, I leave campus in the evening, I am absolutely wiped out.  Sometimes I don’t know how I balance all of this.

Another top priority for me this semester has been applying for summer internships and that takes up a lot of my time. My search has been focused on positions with sports organizations in the DC area and with the many non-profits that are located in this area.  I have definitely done my share of job and internship searching over the years, but this time around has an extra challenge with it.  With having several years of work experience, I am also having to sell the experience I already have but also tell them why they should hire me for an internship position.

 

One similarity with last semester is I am still trying to find the right balance of handling the demands of school and giving myself a break and focusing on things outside of school.  I can’t say I’ve gotten better at that part.  Even over spring break, all I could think about was the schoolwork that I wanted to get accomplished.  While I wanted to make good use of the week to get work done, I also set a goal of reading one book for pleasure during the week off and just laying around a little bit and doing absolutely nothing. 

 

We also had a snow day yesterday and that was super nice to have the day to do schoolwork and rest up a little bit without having to worry about going to campus and being in class.  It was also the first time we’ve had more than a dusting of snow in DC this winter.  I love snow, so I was pretty happy about FINALLY getting that snow!

 

In the last few weeks, there have also been a few prospective students who have sat in on some of my classes.  It is so weird to think that I was in their position exactly one year ago when I came down to American to sit in on a class before deciding to go to school here.