Internship #7

Internship site: Michigan Power Rodding
Department: Advertising (this company doesn't really have designated departments)

Project title: An Adventure through Advertising: The Cost of Reppin' Your Company (original title from me. It's great, I know.)

General Description: In this project, I will be making an Excel spreadsheet of all the different ways to advertise and the cost of each. I will also be adding the length of the ad, the amount of people it will reach, where it will be placed and what the target demographic is.

Learning Objectives: My main goal for this project is to get a feel for how much it really costs to run a company. Other goals include learning to manage money, make wise decisions and deal with a wide variety of people from all over.

Organization/Company Objectives and Benefits: The company benefits because I am basically free labor that they can us to get some info on advertising costs. I will be saving them money by working as an intern to find the easiest and cheapest ways to get their name to people.

Schedule: I'm not really sure how I can make a schedule for this since it's an ongoing project that involves research only. The schedule would just say "research (1/8-1/28)".

Academic Skills: Through this project, I will learn how to use the phone to contact people and organizations to accomplish what I want. I will also have to crunch numbers on the fly to make sure what they are saying to me makes sense with our budget.

Technical Skills: I will need to learn how to organize my research into one spreadsheet and I will learn to search the Internet for potential advertising avenues.

Collaboration Skills and Opportunities: I have already worked closely with the service manager to meet with a couple of representatives from different companies and discuss our plans for advertising. These typed of collaborative meetings should come up more often as I get farther in my research.

Exhibition Plans: Most of this will be just for the office. I will exhibit my research and explain my spreadsheets to the main players in the advertising branch 0f the organization, which includes my mentor, the service manager and my uncle, the proprietor. I will also e-mail this compilation of data to Randy, Robert and Darren as my final product.

Schedule and Timelines: I will finish this project about midway through the final week of internship. That means all of my research has been compiled by the 27th at the latest. After that, I will talk with my mentor and discuss how to present the information professionally and in a way that makes sense. Then on the final day I will present my information to the three people mentioned above.

A Summary of My Week
The highlights of my week were the same every day. The people here are really friendly and work hard to make it a positive environment. There weren't too many challenges because it was easy to adapt to the way things work here. Everyone was easy to get along with and I worked well with them. Unfortunately, a lot of what I saw was to be expected. It's just a typical office, with delivery guys coming and going every other day and people leaving to go work on jobs. As for how I would describe this to someone who's never had an internship, I'm not really sure. It's just like a job, only you don't get paid and you can get kicked out of the school for not doing one. It isn't overtly difficult or new if you've been in school your whole life. Just do your work, do a good job and go home--that seems to be the basic pattern.

All in all, week one was a success. However, I miss school and want to come back as soon as possible.