When I first got into the program I had a really rough time making new friends. I felt like there were not a lot of opportunities offered to go out and meet people. Or maybe there was and I just didn’t take them. I was shy for some reason since I am normally an outgoing person, and it was difficult for me to talk to people other than my roommates. Once I started work I immediately made new friends. It was going great, we would hang out all the time, go to the parks before our shift, talk during work, and overall just spend lots of time together.

For whatever reason I decided to become best friends with the CP’s who were ending their program a month into mine. Meaning, I have just recently had to say goodbye to so many people that I was so close too. Some of them from the US but a few of them were from other countries like Brazil and Mexico. It is sad because it is likely I won’t ever see them again or if I do, it won’t be for a long long time.

This was sad for me and I am not sure why I decided to spend my time and invest in people who were just going to leave anyway. I am grateful for my time with them and I miss them greatly but now I am stuck with the same problem I had in the beginning. I have good coworker friends who I talk to at work all the time but I truly don’t have a single person I think I could go to if I wanted to go to the parks with someone. All those people have left. I am trying to build stronger bonds with my coworkers in hopes to have what I had with my previous friends but it is very hard. It is tiring having to put in all the effort into making new friends again when I just did that less than a month ago.

I am working on pushing myself out there more than I normally do so hopefully I can make some closer friends that I can hang out with outside of work. I think I will be able too it just might take sometime. I have to be patient and know that it is going to take work, but I am willing to do it.

My first month with Disney has honestly been incredible. I have learned a lot and I am grateful for all the experiences I have had. I love my job and I love my coworkers. There are only a few sort of “complaints” I would have but they are really and truly only small and minor things. I overall am so grateful for my role. I work at a small quick service restaurant in the nicest hotel on Disney Property. While it can get busy, most of the guests are very nice and rarely ever do I come across rude people. I have friends in other work locations who tell me other wise.

People who work in attractions say they get rude people all the time and I am so glad I don’t have that. I have only felt overwhelmed twice since I have been at this job which is big for me to say since when I worked at Chick Fil A for two years I would I was probably overwhelmed three times a week. At Disney everyone is super understanding and kind and helpful.

I feel bad sometimes because I always have questions on dumb things but my leaders are always there to help me. They never put me down for not knowing something and constantly tell me how proud they are of me. I get recognized a lot for going above and beyond which feels great. All my coworkers are super fun and it really feels like they have welcomed me into their family. I can’t wait to spend more time making friends and bonding and getting to know the team at Gasparilla Grill.

This internship has really allowed me to practice with all the social media platforms and seeing the videos that do better than others. Last week was a bit of a rough one as i have slowly been getting a little overwhelmed with all the different things going on in my life lately so I accidentally posted the wrong video for twitter and forgot to post the video for the Facebook post, but thankfully my advisor was super understanding and made sure that she just reminded me to make sure that I put the specific Twitter video and adding the video onto Facebook which I remembered for this weeks podcast post.

I also got to deal with having to take a video down as it ended up being harmful for autistic people. I made the video from one of the stories that was posted about a little girl who “suffered” from autism and we were able to get a very understanding comment on the post explaining how hurtful it is to say someone struggles with autism or how someone is non-verbal doesn’t mean that are able to interact in other forms. Having this happen has really allowed me to be extra conscious to make sure that whatever I create, I am not offending anyone. My advisor reached out to me saying she was taking the videos down and that it was not my fault as she usually likes to look over the stories before they go up but she was not able to.

This week of my internship with Stetson’s Men’s Basketball Team was a pretty busy one for me. This week there was not only multiple games going on, but also this week was Senior Appreciation Night on our game Friday. There are only 3 seniors on the team being honored for senior night, but for their departing the Stetson Men’s Basketball Team wanted to do something really special for them. I’m sure there was a lot done in person for the players, but my contribution was helping with some of the social series that the team released honoring their senior players prior to the game this Friday. My boss Joey asked me to create a series of graphic for each of the players earlier and the week and I got to work immediately. I had much more time to work on this series of posts, so I tried to experiment a little more with effects and compositions of the posts a little bit more than usual. Me and Joey when back and forth a few times about how I could best alter the graphics to have the desired feel and effect, and after about four attempts of each graphic, we came to a consensus that the final products were ready to be posted on the teams feed. This experimentation with different tools and techniques has really inspired me to try more new things in the future, and I have already noticed myself using BeHance more often to find inspiration for new types of graphics to diversify my professional portfolio as I am currently looking for my first job in my major.

The past week and a half has been a whirlwind here! I am still working on my everyday tasks in Hubspot (a software that I now feel proficient in), making phone calls to clients, answering any support chats/calls, and attending weekly meetings. 

I have also been consistently pushing out reels and other forms of content that I have been working on and spent a majority of this week preparing for the Instagram takeover that will be taking place mid-next week. This week also brought along a few new experiences – helping create new email footers/graphics for the entire company, working on new email graphics and headers to be sent out to all of our clients, and even working on some marketing content emails. 

And today here in the office, a majority of the full-time employees were out of the office for a Grow FL Entrepreneurial event in Orlando, Florida. With that being said, I had to hold the fort down along with one other team member. While I obviously was not just left to do everything, I think this was a major turning point and a huge opportunity for me to prove that I can handle myself with no guidance or extra assistance. I had to answer several incoming clients calls with a variety of concerns/questions. I monitored the support chat and sent out all of my closing emails – while still completing my creative assignments for that day. 

It’s wild to me how quickly an 8-hour day can go by when you are constantly working on new tasks and/or assignments and really just enjoy working with the people around you.

This past week was a relatively slow week here at the offices. I worked on my daily tasks via Hubspot. Here I work on smaller assignments such as manually updating Hubspot to Sync with our software, setting personas of new clients, looking over churn risks, etc. And I am now connecting with clients, answering any chats that come into the support box, and answering any questions called into the support team. Additionally, I was assigned a new daily task working with the Client List last week. The client list is a massive spreadsheet where we track every client we have ever had, and we track our current clients (deciding if they are high-risk, or low-risk, and updated monthly and annual payments). This is an extremely important project that our CEO oversees daily – as it projects the revenue of the company for up to 5 years. 

Creatively, I created several email header graphics to be sent out to the Marketing email groups this next week. These are all from scratch and often have to incorporate our logo and our partner’s or sponsors’ logos. I was also assigned an Instagram takeover we are collaborating with another company on. At the beginning of March I will be hosting a takeover (meaning lots of pre-made content) of “Seed Your Future”s Instagram. We are creating office tours, hosting interviews with all employees, and even giving a tour of the new Stetson and Details Centurion Sales office space. So this job is rather large, in terms of spreading out the work over this next month to have submitted one week ahead of the takeover. I also am overseeing the more organic content for our social media currently, and am constantly creating in-the-moment ideas!

In the next week, I look forward to learning the new projects I will be assigned, researching trends, working more with SEO, and gaining more knowledge on the marketing workflow of the team!

For my fifth week of internship with the Stetson Men’s Basketball team, I primarily focused on creating more imagery that can be used in graphics at a later date. Because of the nature of the posts on the team’s Instagram, it is a good bet to assume that high resolution cutouts of players will be essential in almost every post, so I am continually trying to aid myself by creating a large collection of player cut-outs that I can use at a moments notice. The interaction between me and my boss / supervisor is most often a request to create a post for an event or game with a day or two’s notice, so having high quality images at my disposal will be a huge help for me and the team’ social media presence.

To help myself with my workflow and minimize the time I use inefficiently, I have made good use of https://gohatters.photoshelter.com/search?terms=crowd& to help me have a plethora of really stunning images without having to go to each game and shoot in poor lighting conditions. The Go Hatters photo store is a tremendous tool for me and has been the reason I have been able to make a majority of the graphics I have created with the composition I desired. The in-game shots that I have utilized are a great tool for me, but maybe in the near future I could get back in the gym and record some content for social media from one of the team’s practices like I had done a lot last semester.

This week I finally was able to practice writing captions for the Monday and Friday posts which are Missing Monday and then on Fridays is promoting their podcast. It has been fun being able to think of what would have the information needed for viewers to get a good synopsis of what the podcast is about and what will make people click on the link.

Thankfully my boss is really easy to get in contact with if I have any questions. From last week, I was able to ask her what kind of cover she would want for the instagram reels and if she wanted me to use the same on as TikTok. Link to TikTok site: https://www.tiktok.com/@murdermurdernews

I am still getting the hang of what is the best to have for the caption for the twitter posts regarding the podcasts because you only get 140 characters and I want to make sure I put the right information in the post. We use a website called Buffer when I can pre plan the posts and it is very helpful because she can also see the posts before they go up and if I need to change anything.