My
internship is with Extreme Sports Scuba in Joplin, MO. Owners Deb and Grady Weston had never had an intern before but they were excited to
let me join their crew. Once they accepted my internship I became their Marketing
Writer Intern. My responsibilities include
writing for their Scuba Blog with
educational material applicable for potential
and current scuba divers, writing newsletters,
working on their website, doing research for
other educational blog posts, and working on creating videos for promotional
and educational purposes.
To
take on this internship prior knowledge of scuba diving and having your open
water scuba certification is absolutely
beneficial. People skills
both verbal and written definitely help because not only are you promoting the
sport of diving, but also you are promoting the family owned and run dive shop
to potential customers.
If you had asked me prior to
my internship if there was much to learn, my answer would have been yes. You
can always learn something no matter how much you have with prior knowledge.
During my internship I have learned much more html when it comes to my scuba
blog as well as working on the website. I have done research coming up with
blog posts so I have learned more about the sport of diving but more so I have
learned new ways to communicate through writing,
how to share this information with beginners as well as those who have been
diving for years. You always have to learn new ways to present information to
people so they don’t feel stupid and beginners
don’t feel like you are talking above their head. In addition to learning new communication skills and
html, I have learned how to make videos to help with the teaching and training
of the scuba classes that are offered at Extreme Sports Scuba. I have also
gained more experience with Photoshop, Word, Excel, InDesign, PowerPoint, iMovie and the web by
creating documents, videos, promotional material, applications and more.
Experience
that I thought I would gain would be document design. Taking the experience I
have and putting it to good use, however when I am there, they usually haven’t
needed fliers made. When I’m not there is when the fliers are needed so other
employees make the fliers. With what I
learned in class, there are certain rules to follow, but rules are made to be
broken and they definitely break the rules.
Sometimes those broken rules work and other times they do not. I really
expected to make more of the fliers for them but so far that just hasn’t
happened.
The
old saying that a company you work
for will change your way of thinking/writing couldn’t be truer. In school, the professors require you write about the ideas they present in any given class. Now that is also true out in the work world about
them choosing what you write about, but you don’t get a grade and typically the
documents you write, anyway with my experience, aren’t more than about a couple
pages long. In school you typically read about something and then write a
specific way, out in the real world, the experience I’ve gained through this
internship has been more knowledge based around the sport of
diving or else it has been more letter writing among other businesses.
The
writing done through Extreme Sports Scuba tends to be either on the spot or
done after there is some research done. For the most part the work is done
before it is needed and then proofread before it goes live. Anything that is of
importance goes through Deb, Grady and/or her assistant instructors as there
shouldn’t be information going out on the internet that isn’t current, accurate
or both. The owners have the ultimate say although anything dealing with
instruction or telling someone about scuba diving that could help or hinder a
person gets signed off before it goes live on
the blog. For the most part this is an internet based job with duties that rely
on communication from Extreme Sports Scuba to businesses both inside and
outside the field.
