The 2018 Fall semester was busy with students doing internships and applying for coveted “Winternship” positions in order to gain exposure to the media industry. This year, several new companies signed on to participate in the popular Winternship program; 30 students were chosen from a large applicant pool to go to sites around the country during the week of January 7-11, 2019. During Winternship week, students will have an immersive, “boot camp” type experience, shadowing media professionals and working on special projects. We’ll report back about their Winternship adventures in our spring newsletter!
FMS’s for-credit internship program was also very active this fall. Students interested in internships attended a panel of former FMS interns and winterns, who shared their learning experiences and encouraged their peers to seek out media internships.
Many students also worked on site in media companies throughout Boston and surrounding communities through the FMS course FMS99. Interning in the fields of journalism, advertising, film, multimedia, marketing, nonprofit communications, and more, these students had the chance to plan and implement real media projects, meet with clients, and learn from top-notch professionals. Here’s what a few of our interns had to say about their internship experiences this fall:
As the hackneyed expression goes, “choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” This quote characterizes my experience working with Steffan Hacker in multimedia for Tufts Communications and Marketing. At the beginning of my internship, I didn’t know how I was going to meet the 150-hour requirement. By the end of it, I was asking myself where all the time had gone. I was involved in over a dozen projects, produced three of my very own, and thoroughly enjoyed myself. I was given remarkable creative autonomy as an intern. My first day on the job, Steffan introduced me to the rest of the team, showed me the studio, sat me down in his office, and asked me if I had any ideas I’d like to see turned into projects. Immediately, I started pitching him on everything from Squirrels on Campus to Jumbo Jugglers. At the time, I didn’t anticipate many of these ideas coming to fruition, but over the course of the semester, many were produced and even featured on Tufts’ main social media channels. There were weekends where Steffan would send me home with a Canon C100, a bunch of lenses, and tell me to take my idea and run with it. Come Monday, I’d return to the office with footage to ingest, edit, and turn into a project. Call it freedom or responsibility—it made my internship memorable. When I wasn’t working on my own projects, I played a supporting role in shoots and production. Both in doing and in assisting, I was able to sharpen my personal, technical, and professional skills.
—Nicolas Chung, Class of 2020
This semester, I took an internship position at the art advisory firm Goodman Taft, located in Cambridge, MA. Double-majoring in art history and film and media studies at Tufts, I knew that an internship at Goodman Taft was the perfect opportunity for me to combine my interests in art and media. As an intern, I gained valuable knowledge of curatorial practices for both private and institutional collections. In addition to curatorial work, I also had the opportunity to learn about collections management and focused on installations, art storage, and collection documentation. Because Goodman Taft works with a range of collections, I furthered both my art historical knowledge as well as my media skills. I am incredibly grateful for my experience at Goodman Taft this semester, and I look forward to continuing my work within the art world.
—Erica Borger, Class of 2019
Without a doubt, being an intern at TribalVision was the most influential internship experience I’ve had over the past few years. At TribalVision—a digital marketing firm based in Boston and Rhode Island—I got the hands-on marketing experience that I’d been searching for. I had the opportunity to complete a wide array of tasks, while learning about valuable marketing programs. The day-to-day never looked exactly the same, which allowed me to explore different aspects of marketing, all of which are equally important. With the help of supervisors, who were always extremely friendly and informative, I learned about Google programs (Analytics, Ads, Shopping, etc.), email marketing, data reporting, client interaction, and much more. This internship turned more generalized skills that I had already developed into skills that are more specific to marketing itself. I got a glimpse at every aspect of working in a marketing agency, which has assured me that this is the career path I want to go toward. I am so grateful for the opportunity to intern at TribalVision!
—Monica Brennan, Class of 2019
If you have a media-related internship at your company and would like to host a Tufts student—or if you would like to participate in future Winternship programs—please contact Leslie Goldberg at leslie.goldberg@tufts.edu
by Leslie Goldberg, FMS Internship Administrator