Last week we had a major update in the software, that unfortunately, altered a few link addresses for several customers. The solution was simple, for users to go into their computer settings and clear their cache. However, as I have learned, many people want these things done FOR them. With that being said, the past week has been OVERFLOWING with support calls and chats, so much so that I feel as though it’s been rather difficult for me to get anything else done! I will, say, although I was never feeling too shabby about my customer service skills, my confidence is through the roof after a week like this. 

I also had about an hour-long conversation with a customer’s CPA yesterday, walking her through the financial side of the software and helping her learn about Stripe, our payment process platform that we partner with. The phone call stood out to me, as it was extremely informational TO ME! I was learning all about the ins and outs of being a CPA, sales taxes, and more! And on top of that, she was such a sweet woman. And I know that seems pointless, however handling customers as a part of any job, is not always an easy thing. Customers can be needy and frustrated and rude, meaning those who show care and grace, really leave an impact. 

This last week wrapping up my internship has been bittersweet. As I prepare to make the transition from intern to full-time staff, the other girls here at the company have shown me so much grace and excitement! Like I have mentioned before, I am starting to pile on more responsibilities and the projects are growing larger (but in all good ways). There have been mentions of trips and travels in my near future, representing the company at events all over the United States.

A few weeks ago, I collaborated with another program called Seed Your Future. This program aims to promote horticulture jobs (and overall awareness) to elementary students, all the way to the university level. They strive to share knowledge about careers working with plants and what all the industry has to offer. 

Before working here at Details, I was far from aware of what opportunities were possible in the horticulture and floriculture industry. From marketing to sales, to social media, and more, there is SO much more to be talked about, that students are so unfamiliar with. 

As I talked about in a previous blog post, I spent that week preparing content, interviewing staff members, creating videos, etc. for their social media takeover. Since that week, I have kept close in contact with the head of their executive director, Jazmin. 

I have now committed to work alongside them and have virtual conversations with Jazmin weekly. We here at Details, are in full support of spreading awareness regarding the horticulture industry and my boss is also in full support of me working on small projects with them. In the fall, Sedd Your Future will be hosting a virtual career fair, and ended up registering me to go to one as a “student” to take notes, log my experiences, and give overall feedback for the career fair they plan on hosting in the future. 

I have enjoyed having more long-term projects and especially making and maintaining connections in the industry with those outside of my current company. Especially with Seed Your Future, I hope to help continue promoting as my role goes on. 

For my tenth week of internship with the Stetson Men’s basketball team, I was asked to do some of the same things I have done last week. Early this week, I was informed by my boss Joey that there was yet again going to be a recruit on campus that I was needed to shoot some photos of. I checked a camera out of the library and prepared to take some photos of the recruit and our coaches. This time when I arrived at the fountain for the photos, I was met by the coaching staff and the recruit, as well as the recruit’s family which was new to me. It was nice to see the future hatter’s family getting excited about our campus and their son’s next step in life. I had at this point done this exact shoot before, so going into the process I already knew the basic poses I thought would look best when edited. We stuck to the typical spinning the ball, crossing the arms, and dribbling between the legs and we were done very quickly. Soon after, we did some shots with the recruit and his parents, and then some with the coaches as well. Before I returned my camera, I went to Flagler hall and edited the photos in Lightroom and sent them over to my boss Joey so that he could distribute them to the player and the coaches as needed. I felt happy with the result of the shoot because I know that I was better prepared than last time and got the shoot done much quicker so that the recruit and coaches could be win their way. The only thing that I wish I would’ve done differently was adjust the lightness and shutter speed of the images so that some of the pictures in motion would’ve had better clarity and brightness so I would have to do a little less correction in Lightroom but ultimately I think it turned out alright.

During my Ninth Week of interning with the Stetson Men’s basketball team, I had a very surprising change of pace. This week, there was going to be potential future hatters on campus and the team needed my help. At the beginning of the week, I received a text from my boss Joey informing me that recruits were going to be on campus Wednesday, and they were hoping that I would be able to meet them at the fountain with my camera to take some photos for them and the players. When I met up with the coaches, I ended up taking some photos of just the players as well as with the coaches, and soon after went back home to edit some of the better ones in Lightroom. After polishing a decent amount of photos, I sent them back and forth with my boss Joey determining which would be best to use. Before the week was over, the kids that were touring stetson ended up committing here, and I was able to contribute to making commitment graphics for the players that I took pictures of. It was nice to know that in a small way my interaction and work might have influenced the players to want to choose stetson, and I thought it was a great experience for me professionally. When I have to do this again in the next coming week, I will have my camera settings already prepared and my composition planned for the shoot. The only part of the interaction that I think we could have more efficiently was having the poses for the players already planned, and my camera already adjusted, so hopefully in this upcoming visit I will remedy that.

For my eighth week of internship with the Stetson University Men’s basketball team, I had a variety of different things that I helped work on. For this week, my primary responsibility was to help build templates yet again for game day graphics as well as for other things that the team may post, such as commitment graphics, holiday graphics, or themed game days where Stetson as well as Stetson students will both be encouraged to follow a guideline of how to dress or cheer at a specific game. For Stetson Specifically, it is most common for us to have a white or green out game, so I continued to work on graphics and templates that have mostly followed this color scheme. Due to my work in previous weeks, it was significantly easier for me to create some of the posts that I needed to because of the fact that I have already cut out a high resolution image of every single player on the team, and now my issue I shaving to go back and remove players that are graduating or transferring rather than having to go back and cut out and add players that I hadn’t made cutouts for like in the past. One thing that I had noticed I changed after making the historic season graphic was that I had started to preserve the original cut outs of players. Typically, I wold rasterize a layer while cutting it out and do camera raw filter to the original layer and end up with an image I can no longer change. Now, I have learned to keep the cut out as a smart object and do a majority of my change on a duplicate layer, as well as the camera raw filter so that if I need to reference the original image, I can grab the original and change the color, resolution, or texture however I see fit in the next project. This change of mindset has greatly helped me improve my workflow, and I can tell that my skills are improving over time due to me consistently working with the team.

During my 8 & 9th weeks of my internship with Thirty Tigers were pretty slow and I was mainly working on researching vertical video content and getting strategies for our social media. On my 8th week I realized why things suddenly got quiet. I received the news early that week that both of my supervisors would be leaving the company and that the new person I would report to would be the head of distribution, who was my supervisors’s boss. I then spent that week planning out our social media schedule for the next month with completed post and captions so I could keep on posting during this transition period. I also worked on making some vertical video cuts for one of our artist who was dropping a new song that week. I took the horizontal video, converted it to vertical and added text overlays with the song information. I attended our weekly company wide zoom meeting and made my weekly New Music Friday posts that I add to our stories each week. On Thursday my supervisor connected me with the head of distribution and we planned a meeting for the follow week.

The 6th and 7th weeks of my internship were focused a lot on social media. Nothing major really happened. I worked on the google document that my supervisor and I created which is a planner for all our future posts. I come up with about two weeks’ worth of posts and my supervisor looks at the doc and gives me feedback and approves the posts. When we post on social media we like to keep a steady rotation of tour dates posts, the album features for our new releases, and music videos for new releases. On Mondays and Tuesdays, I post about what albums were released that past Friday and then alternate between tour stuff and music videos. This has been a good formula for us and since I have started posting for them, I have boosted engagement by over 40 percent! It has also been interesting in seeing what posts do well and what gets less engagement, for example, I noticed that sometimes our music video posts get a lot fewer views than our photos do. I have been keeping an eye on them lately and found that if I post in the middle afternoon they get better engagement. Another thing I have been working on is tracking popular TikTok accounts for artists not on our label and taking notes on what performs well. My supervisor created a spreadsheet that lists some popular accounts right now like Hardy, Zach Bryan, Noah Kahn, and Paramore. I went through these videos and picked out their most popular stuff and tracked what is in these videos. That way we can have examples to show our artists what they can post. Lastly, I ended the week with another concert, I saw Chris Thile from Nickel Creek perform with The Orlando Philharmonic at the Doctor Philips and it was incredible. I even got to introduce myself to him after the show and he was super kind.

Once I got into the program I immediately asked a ton of my friends if they would want to come visit me at some point while I was in Disney since I would get free passes and discounts. I had a few friends who said they wanted to visit but we never got to planning it. Three of my friends immediately got to planning. One of them was my friend named Joanna. We went to high school together and were super close for a long time. I called her and within one night we planned the entire trip. I was so excited for her to come.

I was lucky enough to get the day off for her to visit. She brought her boyfriend with her so she wouldn’t have to travel alone. This was my first time meeting him. He was super nice and I am honestly glad that he came. I never once felt like I was third wheeling, it felt like a group vacation it was a blast. They payed for a really nice breakfast for me the first day which was really sweet. We went on every ride each day at every park. This was Joanna’s and her boyfriends first time at Disney World so I wanted to give them a memorable experience. They have both been to Disneyland many times before and I was worried they were going to like Disneyland more than World because a lot of people say that.

By the end of the trip they both agreed Disney World is way better than Land and that made me so happy. They stayed at a resort and I stayed at my apartment just so it wasn’t weird for her boyfriend since he didn’t know me all that well at first which I had no problem with. We had so much fun and ate such good food. They also payed for a really nice dinner at a super cool sci fyi restaurant in Hollywood Studios where you eat inside a car at a drive in movie. They were super grateful and honestly it felt like such a fun vacation with one of my friends I truly had an amazing time and it made me so happy to give two people a great first time experience at Disney World.