The First Impressions

Once school ended on this study abroad trip, everything about our experience here changed completely. I remember how nervous I was when I made my way to Bashful for the first time by myself. I was thinking so hard about the entire experience that I completely overthought the entire process. Once I arrived at my office for the first time, a woman who had previously interned at the company showed me around and we went out for coffee to talk about Bashful and how everything worked together. The tradition at Bashful is for a new employee to have a ‘Bashful buddy’ for their first week. First of all, Bashful is an advertisement agency compromised of an account management, strategy, creative, & digital department. The account management dept. works with the clients to make sure they get everything they want with the advertisements. The strategy dept. works in tandem with account management to create a plan or ‘strategy’ to achieve the requests of the clients while also working on a pitch for the creative department. After the strategy dept. comes up with a plan, they pitch it to the creative group and they take the strategy into action in order to design the ad itself. The digital dept. works almost exclusively on social media and digital advertisements to promote client brands.

Everything I just mentioned probably sounds very confusing, but the reality of the internship process is that your supervisor expects you to understand it all. When you are immersed in the office environment working on research and partnering with different people in each department, you learn things so fast. My first three days were very chaotic and I felt like I could not contribute to my full potential mostly because I was nervous and had a lack of knowledge on advertising. However, just in the second week I feel so much more confident in my abilities to help the agency solve solutions to their problems and produce quality research about client competitors. My major is communication studies and I did not have much experience working in an advertisement field. The thing to take away from all this is that no matter where you end up in your internship, you will land on your feet. The people you work with here are very friendly, want to help you, and see you grow. The key is to stay positive and never think any questions is a ‘dumb’ question because asking questions when you are unsure about something is one of the best ways to learn (trust me you will ask many). So far, the internship at Bashful has been my favorite part of the trip and I feel like the people I work with are making a very positive impact on me. Working 9-5 throughout the week is preparing me for the real world work environment and contributing to my professional development.