Kaitlyn Harris, Aiken House Intern (Reflection 3)

I have now reached the midpoint of my internship at Aiken House, which means that my intern duties are beginning to shift as I prepare for the end of my internship in May. I had my midpoint check-in with my internship advisor and my fellow interns where we discussed what the next few months will look like during our internship. Previously I was responsible for writing and posting three blogs each week. This has taught me a lot about the writing, editing, and publishing process and has allowed me to practice writing styles I wasn’t previously familiar with. However, as my internship is coming to an end, we are beginning to shift our focus to other aspects of what Aiken House does. Because Aiken House is a venture studio, they handle a lot of different responsibilities for their clients. The blogs I write for three of our clients helps to boost visibility on their site, as well as promoting their businesses. Instead of just writing blogs each week, I will now be writing and posting two blogs each week, commenting on three other blogs written by previous interns, and posting to a clients’ social media accounts. I am very excited about this shift in my internship because it not only is something new that I get to learn, but it will also give me more experience that I can use in my future employment. The blogs I am commenting on are older blogs and commenting on these blogs helps to recirculate them on the web to boost visibility of them and make them more recent. This was something new I learned about how web searches work; the more recent activity, the more those blogs will come up in search results. This has given me a look at how the world of online media and writing works that I am excited to learn more about as I move forward. Posting to the social media sites of some of our clients has also been exciting to me because I hope to go into publishing and editing after school, and marketing is very important in this field. While one might think it is as easy to just log onto Twitter and make a post, posting to social media for businesses is a much more detailed activity. During our midpoint check in we had a training on using a specific site to schedule a post to publish to the designated social media sites for each business, as well as how to use certain sites to find the right hashtag that will get your post seen by the most people. Our training also showed us how to use emojis to our benefit, common phrases and pictures that attract the most readers, and even what time to post to each site to attract the most visibility. This aspect of my internship has really opened my eyes to the science that goes into what I used to assume was a simple social post; it has taught me more about the true impact social media has on us and how it is designed a certain way to attract certain readers. The last thing we discussed in our midpoint meeting was the final project of our internship, which is to create our own site like the ones we write blogs for. For my site, I must create a content calendar, scheduled social posts, a pitch for the company, and a few other aspects to really showcase what I have learned during my internship at Aiken House. I am very excited about this final project, and I cannot wait to see how it develops over the next few months.

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