As a college student, the main thing that employers are looking for post-graduation is experience and your degree. At times throughout my life, I have thought of some many different avenues that I wanted to go down and the thought of them is great, but sometimes when you actually apply yourself into those situations, you realize that you really like them or you really do not like them.
This past summer, I was blessed with one of the best internships that I could have asked for. I worked for Penn Waste Inc, which is a waste and recycling hauler in south-central Pennsylvania. Currently, I am majoring in Business Administration, which is the avenue I do want to pursue and graduate with a degree in, but that was the only avenue of business that I really ever focused on. My internship position, however, was a Marketing and Sales internship. Marketing was something I was always interested in but never thought that I had the creative mind to come up with innovative ways to reach our target market.
My boss, who I worked alongside with this past summer, really has opened my doors to so much more opportunity and really has shown me what the world of marketing is all about. My internship was very hands-on and everything that she did, she allowed me to do as well. We met with several different advertising and printing companies throughout the week to talk with them about how we were going to display our materials to our customers via television, billboards, newspaper ads, etc. I was also able to be a part of developing my very own advertisements for the company and present them in front of the company's senior management team, which is something that I have never done before and was able to sit in on several business meetings.
Throughout this internship, I was also able to learn more about sales and business development, which to be honest with you had no idea about. I can really say that I have grown a really strong interest and liking for different avenues of business that I never thought I would ever see myself in. This is all because of one internship that I had this past summer. This internship not only has opened my doors in that way but has also helped me connect with even more people in the area that I will be working within the future. Experience is what is going to teach us what need to know in the real world and how our job is actually done. We all can read the textbook, but not all of can do the job!
