It’s hard to believe that August has arrived and is here to stay. As many begin to end their summer internships and start preparing for school again, I thought I would take the time to reflect on my internship experiences in New York; two entirely different, yet somewhat intriguingly related experiences, which, as you can probably guess, both involve writing.
My first internship this summer is at Gotham Writers Workshop, a creative writing school for teens and adults. At Gotham, I work with four other interns throughout the week answering phones, managing registrations, and talking to students about Gotham’s wide variety of classes. Get this – Gotham has everything a writer would ever want; from one-on-one classes to online group classes, free events in Bryant park to social events with food and wine every Friday night.
What I love most at Gotham is coming up with course curriculum ideas and helping determine contest winners. Each month, Gotham holds a story contest on Twitter where users have to tell their stories in less than ten words. Believe it or not, but some of these entries can get pretty dark and also pretty interesting. The most recent winner is here.
I come in every morning and sit with the other interns at our cozy intern desk, sipping my iced coffee while checking the staff email. I write blog posts, update the Twitter feed, and at any point, I can turn around and chat with another co-worker in the office.
The writing I do at Gotham is new for me. I am not only taking a creative writing class and learning how to write engaging and relatable short stories, but I write ten-word stories, the first lines of a horror stories, and generate sample resumes as part of my job. I write in ways that are seemingly simple, but actually require more time and thought than one would think.
On the other hand, my second internship introduced me to an entirely different realm of writing. At SJI Associates, an advertising agency that designs creative ad campaigns for television series such as Downton Abbey, I sit in a decorated cubicle and help generate taglines and headlines for campaigns. The writing here is much sharper. With as few words as possible, these phrases must resonate with a targeted audience while harboring clever underlying meanings.
I never realized how much brainstorming, collaboration, and discussion about these few words must happen for a campaign before it is even created. I also never realized how challenging it would be to develop a tagline that delivers immediate results and meets the client’s needs.
It is most definitely a balancing act, working in these different industries. Navigating both internships has been challenging, because in each respective office, I am forced to think in new ways and write in new styles. At Gotham, I am writing fictional pieces and blogs for an audience that loves writing. At SJI, I am writing something that might appear on a billboard or a magazine for an audience that watches a particular television series.
While there are some stark contrasts in the types of writing at these internships, I have learned a tremendous amount from both. As the president of SJI says, as long as you know how to write well, you can learn to write in a variety of different ways and to apply that writing to different circumstances. I have strengthened my writing in more ways that I thought I ever would or ever could, and I am very grateful for it.
