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My Internship in Rome (Week 5) – Midterm Post

My Internship in Rome (Week 5) – Midterm Post

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This semester in Rome, I was fortunate enough to get hired as a marketing intern for a company called The Roman Guy. The Roman Guy specializes in various VIP tours of different tourist attractions all around Rome, as well as several local food tours in different areas. As an assignment for my class ROST 370, I am required to reflect on my experience of working as an intern for this company.

When I first started this internship, to be honest I did not know what to expect. I’ll admit that I was really excited but also scared over the thought of having an internship in a foreign country. Upon visiting the office for the first time, I expected it to be a huge office with a lot of workers. This surprised me when I first arrived, because the office is pretty small with only about 30 employees. It also surprised me how young the majority of my coworkers are. When I had my first meeting with my bosses Lorna and Sian, they told me that for my internship I would be doing a lot of research on different tourist destinations in Rome and a lot of writing. My internship so far has been filling this expectation, because every week I am given an assignment to finish a blog post about a tourist attraction. For example, this week I had the assignment of the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican. I spent one of my work days researching the history of the chapel, the artists who painted there, their artwork, and specific rules the chapel has upon visiting. After gathering all of this information, I then have to write a blog post about it and send it to my other boss Francesca when i’m finished for revision. She then looks it over and asks me to change anything if it needs it, and then she sends it over to the graphic design team who then publishes my post to the company’s website. I also expected this internship to be strengthening my marketing skills, and so far having this internship has been filling that expectation. Part of my job is to run the companies instagram, and this previous week I had to read different articles on how to appeal more to your audience and gain more followers. From this, I began to create more aesthetically pleasing posts which helped target a specific audience and ultimately helped us gain more followers. So far, the most interesting part of my internship is when I create different tourism attraction posts for our company’s website. It is interesting to me because I am improving my writing skills drastically and also it is interesting to keep learning new things about different attractions in Rome that I never knew before. It is also awesome to see my finished blog post on our company’s website because it makes me proud of my work. So far, one of the tasks that I have to do that I find the least interesting is editing blog posts using the blog life cycle. For each blog post, there is a checklist that our company has to follow to make sure that the blog has each aspect in order to make a strong post. This is my least favorite task because it usually takes a while to change a specific blog post because some are harder to edit than other ones. Also, it can be frustrating when you have done everything that you thought you could have to make a blog better but WordPress says that the post is not good and still needs more editing. So far, this academic internship has been improving my understanding of concepts that I learned from other marketing courses in college, but in a different way. In my internship, we use aspects like having a target audience and using general marketing tactics to make our company more well known. It is different in a sense because most of my marketing courses focused on marketing a huge corporation or a product, and this internship focuses on marketing our brand as well as a photo, event, or a blog post. Some personal learning goals that I have for this internship are to expand my marketing skills, strengthen my writing, and improve my creativity. So far, I have been achieving my goal of expanding my marketing skills and strengthening my writing, but at this point in my internship I am focusing on being more creative with our content and being more independent with my work. So far, that is my complete reflection about my internship and so far I am really enjoying it. I can’t wait to see what the future holds and how I will change as a person once this internship is completed.

Thanks for reading and ciao amici!

 

My Internship in Rome (Week 1)

My Internship in Rome (Week 1)

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Ciao! This semester in Rome, I was fortunate enough to get hired as a marketing intern for a company called The Roman Guy. The Roman Guy specializes in various VIP tours of different tourist attractions all around Rome, as well as several local food tours in different areas. As an assignment for my class ROST 370, I am required to reflect on my experience of working as an intern for this company.

Specific tasks

Working as a marketing intern for The Roman Guy is an interesting job because all of my assigned tasks frequently change and I am never stuck doing the same thing. For my first week, my job has been very writing intensive as I have been working on creating and editing blogs, writing an article about the Colosseum for our Rome Key Attractions Page, and posting on our company’s food instagram (The Roman Foodie). So far, classroom knowledge has helped me a lot because I am able to use an abundance of information that I learned about marketing from taking the class this previous spring semester and apply it to what I am working on at my internship in order to help market our content better.

Learning objectives

 

As an intern, I was required to create several learning objectives that I want to achieve by the end of the semester. One of my biggest learning objectives was to improve my writing skills for blog posts and various social media apps, and have the whole marketing department critique my work for improvements. Little did I know that my first week on the job I would already be making progress towards my learning objective. I am not the most confident when it comes to my writing, but I am happy that my internship had my beginning tasks be writing intensive because then that way I can have more time to improve on this skill throughout the semester. There is a lot more to blogging than what meets the eye. At our company, we have a checklist called The Blog Lifecycle where there are about 15 different extensive tasks that need to be completed in order to have a successful blog post. My first day on the job, I learned all about the cycle and this is what I am using as my guideline in order to improve my writing skills and create a successful blog post which will ultimately help me make progress towards my learning objective.

 

Problems and Challenges

Some problems that I have had involving my internship is writing for an extensive period of time. Sometime I have to be writing the entire time I am working which can be around five hours. At first it was hard for me to stay focused, but now I am getting used to writing for a long period of time and also finding out about the free espresso machine in our office made everything a lot easier. Another one of my challenges is using public transportation to get to my work. During my first week, I learned how to correctly use the regional train the hard way as I accidently got on the wrong train and it took me about 25 minutes outside of Balduina. This was scary, because I had no idea where I was and it was getting pretty late at night. When I asked several people for help, they ignored me or told me that they didn’t know how to help me. Luckily, I found this one extremely generous lady who helped me get on the right train and she even taught me how to correctly use the Rome transportation system so that I would never make the same mistake again. Now I always leave a bit earlier so that I can make sure that I have enough time to get to where I need to in order to prevent getting on the wrong train from happening again.

What Impresses me about my internship

So far, the most impressive thing about my internship is all of my coworkers, as they are all extremely talented and good at their jobs. The Roman Guy is an extremely small company that is very successful, so it is amazing to see how the whole staff works together to create great content and get more customers. I am very lucky to be working in the marketing department with my coworkers Lorna, Sian, and Francesca, because they all very experienced in the marketing field and they all inspire me in many ways. It is only the first week and I already have learned many new things from them that I can apply to my future career.

Expectations for the future

In the future, I am expected to keep improve my writing skills as I have to create about 10 blog posts total for our company’s Key Attraction Page. I expect this to be very difficult, because each post needs to be thought out and edited carefully. It also takes a long period of time to create just one post, so I am ready for this challenge that I will be facing in the future.

I am so excited for the future and to see how my internship will help me grow as an individual, and I will keep posting updates on my work. Arrivederci!