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Excellent job to
my panel members!

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Good afternoon.

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My name is Leela and I will be
doing the presentation today.

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And I wanted to start out by
asking all of you a question.

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So who has bought
a book recently?

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All right.

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Can I have a couple
volunteers tell me where

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they purchased this book from?

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Go.

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The Odyssey.

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Odyssey.

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Amazon.

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OK.

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Anyone else?

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Barnes and Noble.

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OK.

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So what we can gather from
that is that not a ton of you

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are saying small, local
book stores, right?

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OK, so we got The
Odyssey but we're

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kind of required to
buy books from there,

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and it's still
obscenely expensive.

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So a lot of people
are buying their books

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from Amazon and Barnes and
Noble and these big companies.

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And that's if they're
buying books today, right?

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Because I don't
know about you guys,

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but I find a lot of my
information on the internet.

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So that's where I'm going
for my source of news

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or entertainment,
mostly, to be honest.

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And my prob this summer
was to figure out,

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how do you make people care
about a local bookstore?

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So that is kind of a
two-fold challenge.

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One, you get people
interested in books.

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Two, you have to get people
interested in buying books

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from a small, local bookstore,
in Seacoast New Hampshire

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which I think is pretty
cool but everyone else

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is like, where is that?

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And that was one of my tasks.

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I worked at RiverRun Bookstore
in Portsmouth, New Hampshire

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and I did social
media and PR for them.

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And I will tell you
guys how I found that.

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So I found that
internship because I

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went into the summer looking
for an internship that

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would give me professional
experience outside of--

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not outside of my academic
wheelhouse but kind of stretch

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me a little bit.

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And so I planned
out these things.

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And very similarly
to Dani and Alicia

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I didn't have a lot pan out.

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And so I was sitting
there, oh my gosh

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I don't have an internship.

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I'm a failure.

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All of my friends have
really awesome internships

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and I was like, OK, all right,
this is how my life is going.

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So what I did was, I did
some personal networking.

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And I happened upon
this internship.

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And it was with a bookstore
that was close to home,

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which was really great.

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And it's owned by about
13 different shareholders

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or whatever you'd call it.

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I don't know the
intricacies of business.

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But one of the owners is Tom
Holbrook who actually ended up

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being my supervisor.

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And he also runs the bookstore
on a day to day basis.

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So he contacted me and said
I'd love to work with you.

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Let's figure out
what you can do.

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And we had our first meeting.

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It was very relaxed,
in a coffee shop.

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I got an iced tea.

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It was great.

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And he was like, you can
do whatever you want to do.

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And he said, you could do
social media, you could writing,

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that kind of stuff.

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And that seemed like
a pretty cool idea,

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going into an
internship and being

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able to craft it as my own.

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And what I ended up doing
in this internship is,

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I did a couple press releases.

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I did it for events
at the bookstore.

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I did it for books
that were published

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through the sister company which
is an independent publishing

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press.

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And I also looked up stuff for
events and that type of stuff.

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And that was great.

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The majority of my
time was actually

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spent creating a website
which I'm going to show you.

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And it was for your
sister independent press.

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So I'm actually
going to show you,

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originally I did
this on WordPress.

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And I did not create this one.

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This is the original platform
that I was kind of going off.

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And it's since been edited.

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But this gives you a feel
for what I was working with.

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So if you go onto this
page, this is like, welcome!

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And it has kind of
this essay, right?

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And I don't know about
you guys, but that's not

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appealing for the splash
page of a website.

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It's like way too much.

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And so this is what Tom created.

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And he also, like, if
you can see [INAUDIBLE]..

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So what I did was, I had
to take this information

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about publishing, which I had
no idea anything about it.

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And I had to create it
into something else.

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Ooh.

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So this is what I created.

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Thank you, thank you.

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And so part of this
process was figuring out,

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how do I make this
appealing to human eye

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and how do I get people that
we want interested in it?

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And how do I convey
the information

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that we want to get to them?

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And this was challenging,
because I didn't know anything

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about publishing.

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And I had to work with
what you saw before

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and figure out how to get
that into a good format.

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And not only was it not
aesthetically pleasing,

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Tom has a very casual
language because he's all

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about this being a
press where you work one

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on one with someone
and get to know them

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and you get to have
control over your project.

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But if you want to
get more customers

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and be a more
professional business,

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you have to have a
professional outlook.

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So that was challenging.

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And then the other thing was,
because I didn't know anything

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about it, getting information
to put in this About section,

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or getting information to put
in the publishing packages,

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was very difficult. It
was like pulling teeth.

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And that was awkward because
he was my supervisor.

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It was like, ah,
how do I do this?

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So that was the main thing
of what I did this summer.

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Over all, coming out of this
internship, I did not enjoy it.

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And there's a lot of people
in this audience who know me.

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Thank you very much for coming.

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And you know that I'm a
fairly type A personality

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and I like to have structure.

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I like to know where I'm going.

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And so the
flexibility thing that

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seemed so great at the
beginning of the summer

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was not so great because I
didn't really have direction.

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I was trying to push
for things to happen

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and they weren't happening.

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And I just, I don't understand
why it's not that easy for you

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to just tell me what you want.

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So it was also difficult
for me to be working one

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on one with someone.

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It was just me and
Tom all summer.

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And it was interesting
to figure out

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how interact with an
adult in a different way

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than interacting with professors
as we do everyday on campus,

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and figure out how to get
what I needed from him.

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So that was one of the
skills I really learned.

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And I also got to transfer
some of my writing skills

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into this internship.

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And that was really great.

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So I think overall
from this internship,

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I got what I was looking for.

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I learned what it was
like to be in a type

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of professional environment,
which was small business.

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And I learned what
I liked about it

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and what I didn't like about it.

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And I got some new skills.

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So I think the take away, I
would say, from my internship,

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and also from the other
three panelists today,

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is that a lot of people, a lot
of sophomores and first years--

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hopefully there are some
of you in this crowd

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because that was the goal.

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A lot of people
think, I have to get

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an internship that is on the
direct career path I want.

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I have to get it in my major.

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It has to be with
this big company.

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And I have to get my foot in the
door and I'm going to get hired

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and it's going to be great.

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If you can do that,
that's awesome.

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But that is not the end
goal of internships.

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That is not the end goal of
learning at college, especially

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at a liberal arts college
like Mount Holyoke.

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It's about going into
whatever type of experience

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you can get into and taking
as much from it as you can.

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And so I just want to
say that to you guys.

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And thank you very much
for your attention.

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[APPLAUSE]

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