Excellent job to my panel members!
Good afternoon.
My name is Leela and I will be doing the presentation today.
And I wanted to start out by asking all of you a question.
So who has bought a book recently?
All right.
Can I have a couple volunteers tell me where
they purchased this book from?
Go.
The Odyssey.
Odyssey.
Amazon.
OK.
Anyone else?
Barnes and Noble.
OK.
So what we can gather from that is that not a ton of you
are saying small, local book stores, right?
OK, so we got The Odyssey but we're
kind of required to buy books from there,
and it's still obscenely expensive.
So a lot of people are buying their books
from Amazon and Barnes and Noble and these big companies.
And that's if they're buying books today, right?
Because I don't know about you guys,
but I find a lot of my information on the internet.
So that's where I'm going for my source of news
or entertainment, mostly, to be honest.
And my prob this summer was to figure out,
how do you make people care about a local bookstore?
So that is kind of a two-fold challenge.
One, you get people interested in books.
Two, you have to get people interested in buying books
from a small, local bookstore, in Seacoast New Hampshire
which I think is pretty cool but everyone else
is like, where is that?
And that was one of my tasks.
I worked at RiverRun Bookstore in Portsmouth, New Hampshire
and I did social media and PR for them.
And I will tell you guys how I found that.
So I found that internship because I
went into the summer looking for an internship that
would give me professional experience outside of--
not outside of my academic wheelhouse but kind of stretch
me a little bit.
And so I planned out these things.
And very similarly to Dani and Alicia
I didn't have a lot pan out.
And so I was sitting there, oh my gosh
I don't have an internship.
I'm a failure.
All of my friends have really awesome internships
and I was like, OK, all right, this is how my life is going.
So what I did was, I did some personal networking.
And I happened upon this internship.
And it was with a bookstore that was close to home,
which was really great.
And it's owned by about 13 different shareholders
or whatever you'd call it.
I don't know the intricacies of business.
But one of the owners is Tom Holbrook who actually ended up
being my supervisor.
And he also runs the bookstore on a day to day basis.
So he contacted me and said I'd love to work with you.
Let's figure out what you can do.
And we had our first meeting.
It was very relaxed, in a coffee shop.
I got an iced tea.
It was great.
And he was like, you can do whatever you want to do.
And he said, you could do social media, you could writing,
that kind of stuff.
And that seemed like a pretty cool idea,
going into an internship and being
able to craft it as my own.
And what I ended up doing in this internship is,
I did a couple press releases.
I did it for events at the bookstore.
I did it for books that were published
through the sister company which is an independent publishing
press.
And I also looked up stuff for events and that type of stuff.
And that was great.
The majority of my time was actually
spent creating a website which I'm going to show you.
And it was for your sister independent press.
So I'm actually going to show you,
originally I did this on WordPress.
And I did not create this one.
This is the original platform that I was kind of going off.
And it's since been edited.
But this gives you a feel for what I was working with.
So if you go onto this page, this is like, welcome!
And it has kind of this essay, right?
And I don't know about you guys, but that's not
appealing for the splash page of a website.
It's like way too much.
And so this is what Tom created.
And he also, like, if you can see [INAUDIBLE]..
So what I did was, I had to take this information
about publishing, which I had no idea anything about it.
And I had to create it into something else.
Ooh.
So this is what I created.
Thank you, thank you.
And so part of this process was figuring out,
how do I make this appealing to human eye
and how do I get people that we want interested in it?
And how do I convey the information
that we want to get to them?
And this was challenging, because I didn't know anything
about publishing.
And I had to work with what you saw before
and figure out how to get that into a good format.
And not only was it not aesthetically pleasing,
Tom has a very casual language because he's all
about this being a press where you work one
on one with someone and get to know them
and you get to have control over your project.
But if you want to get more customers
and be a more professional business,
you have to have a professional outlook.
So that was challenging.
And then the other thing was, because I didn't know anything
about it, getting information to put in this About section,
or getting information to put in the publishing packages,
was very difficult. It was like pulling teeth.
And that was awkward because he was my supervisor.
It was like, ah, how do I do this?
So that was the main thing of what I did this summer.
Over all, coming out of this internship, I did not enjoy it.
And there's a lot of people in this audience who know me.
Thank you very much for coming.
And you know that I'm a fairly type A personality
and I like to have structure.
I like to know where I'm going.
And so the flexibility thing that
seemed so great at the beginning of the summer
was not so great because I didn't really have direction.
I was trying to push for things to happen
and they weren't happening.
And I just, I don't understand why it's not that easy for you
to just tell me what you want.
So it was also difficult for me to be working one
on one with someone.
It was just me and Tom all summer.
And it was interesting to figure out
how interact with an adult in a different way
than interacting with professors as we do everyday on campus,
and figure out how to get what I needed from him.
So that was one of the skills I really learned.
And I also got to transfer some of my writing skills
into this internship.
And that was really great.
So I think overall from this internship,
I got what I was looking for.
I learned what it was like to be in a type
of professional environment, which was small business.
And I learned what I liked about it
and what I didn't like about it.
And I got some new skills.
So I think the take away, I would say, from my internship,
and also from the other three panelists today,
is that a lot of people, a lot of sophomores and first years--
hopefully there are some of you in this crowd
because that was the goal.
A lot of people think, I have to get
an internship that is on the direct career path I want.
I have to get it in my major.
It has to be with this big company.
And I have to get my foot in the door and I'm going to get hired
and it's going to be great.
If you can do that, that's awesome.
But that is not the end goal of internships.
That is not the end goal of learning at college, especially
at a liberal arts college like Mount Holyoke.
It's about going into whatever type of experience
you can get into and taking as much from it as you can.
And so I just want to say that to you guys.
And thank you very much for your attention.
[APPLAUSE]