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ENGL388P

Final Reflection Essay

Marketing Intership at Howard Bank

Mallory Papaps

December 21, 2016

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Howard Bank Internship

My internship with Howard Bank has cultivated my real-life work experience. Having

the opportunity to see the legistics of marketing and how infleuncial writing is to the field, I have

broaden my professional aresenal. As an intern experience, I had the chance to compare my

expectations with the actualities, enhance my academic experiences, experience highlights,

tackle work conflict and/dissappointment, evaluate my work contributions, reflect on my onsite

supervision, and reflect on the feedback I have received. These entities to discuss allow for me to

grow as a professional candidate and effienct college student.

Expectations have the power to set the tone of an experience. Fortunealy, my

expectations and reality were very similar allowing for me to have a postive tone. Upon chosing

this marketing internship with Howard Bank, I expected much involvement with outside

sponserships, advertisments, relavance in social media, and promotional unites. There were

several times a week where Howard Bank would sumbit a sponsership request, sponsership

consent form, and fulfilling sponsership duties. Sometimes these duties would include sending in

money, providing promotional giveaways for events, creating a presentation, and/or attending

events. Very frequently advertisments would created and sent out. There is a binder of

advertisments, slogans, and logos that have already been preapproved by the compliance section

of Howard Bank. One of the most time consuming processes included work on social media.

This social media work included Howard Bank’s Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Website, and

blog. From banking articles, to employee spotlight pieces, new product development, job

listings, shoutouts, and any other new information Howard Bank received and/or offered would

be be blasted into the cyberweb. We did a lot of work with promotional teams that offered little

promotional giveaways from pens to shirts to bags to notepads. As far as professional

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expectations go, I expected to attend meetings, do tedious office work, and gain more

responsibilty. All of which, were met. I attended several meetings, preformed a lot of tedious

office work like copying and sending emails, and gradually gained more responsibilty.

This internship has provided me with knowledge and skills that impacted my academic

experiences. This internship absolutely caused me to learn time management. Coming in twice a

week working a full work day, on top of club lacrosse, and all of my academic resposibilities,

absolutely infleunced my time management. This ability to assess and demonstrate time

management in an academic setting is crucial. This internship helped me in my professional

writing course. Because of the professional writing style, almost technical writing style, that this

marketing internship entailed, I was able to transpire those skills into my professional writing

english course. In marketing, the writing becomes important to be clear, consice, and direct. The

same writing style is applied in professional/technical writing. This helped me in my final

professional writing project, assignments throughout the semseter, and understanding of the

course material.

The highlight of my internship was when my supervisor put me fully in charge in writing

manager biographies. I had to gather information, essentially interview, on all branch managers

and mortgage loan officers and write a small biography on them for the website. I traveled to

most, if not all, branch locations to interview the branch managers and mortgage loan officers.

Upon gathering the information, I had to write a paragraph biography. Once the revamped and

updated website was launched, my work appeared. I was excited that my supervisor put this

responsibilty on me. I had earned to respect and responsibility as a writer and professional

character which was an essential highlight for me during my internship.

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A main conflict during my internship experience was my specific work schedule.

Because I only worked on Tuesday’s and Thursday’s, I had missed several essential meetings

and left my supervisor hanging on some projects. These marketing meetings absolutely became

important. Not only would they serve me experience, but information relayed in them was

crucial. My supervisor couldn’t always keep track of what I was aware of or not. Often times I

would not understand a project or task which would take time away from my supervisor to

explain it to me. If there were pressing projects that involved significant amounts of work, and I

was a key contributor, having a specific and tight internship schedule allowed me to have to

leave my supervisor in some significant times. I would offer to my supervisor to call or email me

with any help or questions to relieve my absence that was essentially out of my control.

I had several contribuations during this internship, some of which was significant and

others that were not very significant. As mentioned prior in my highlights, writing the

biographies was a huge contribuation that I most proud of. I helped revamp the interface of

Howard Banks website. Not only did I get to learn the backend of a website, but I was able to

control it, too. I also became in charge of the employee interface software database, which

included time cards, benefits, news and announcments, employee quicklinks, and the essentials

of a employee driven business. I often times drafted all employee emails for my supervisor,

created marketing brochures for the branchs, and wrote internal work procedures. Some

contributions that were not as significant included tedious office work. Maybe this work

sometimes is very important but it did not make much of an impact. This included copying,

organizing office space and material closets, little business errands, and sorting files. Although

those little acts become important in the larger picture, I felt silly. I felt very confident in my

contributions as they were highly regarded, appreciated, and up to quality and standard.
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My relationship with my supervisor became a crucial component during this internship. I

interacted with my supervisor constantly throughout the day. I would sit in her office in the

morning to discuss what needed to be done, cordinate with her throughout the day regarding my

work, and work directly with her on projects, work travels, and errands. Having to work so close

with my supervisor allowed for a personal relatiosnhip to develop. As that relationship began to

develop, it trasposed into our work rthyem together. My supervisor taught me immense skills and

qualities that are demanded of a marketing employee. I would rate my supervisor with a solid 4.

The reason she would not be a 5 is because her personal life often distracted and impacted her

work life. I understand that personal life takes a huge tole on someone, but several times should

would take off, leaving me without much work and confusion on the work I did have. But when

she was mentally and physically present, she was incredible efficient. She worked very hard and

thorough and pushed me to do my best. She would often point out the littlest of things to fix,

when they could easily be left alone, just so the work and quality would be the absolute best it

could possibly be. She also was very passionate about her job. Someone can be an incredible

employee, but when there is not passion, it is what separates employees. My supervisor was

always anthusiastic, excited, and whole heartedly involved with her work. This made my

comfortable, excited, and eager to work harder and efficiently.

Over the course of my internship, there have been two pieces of constructive citicism that

I have effectively received: timliness and work quality. Often times I would show up around 15

minutes late to work. Maybe that is because I would come in at 8am having stayed up incredibly

late doing homework, and then having to drive 45 minutes to work. In the workplace, it doesn’t

matter the story and excuse. I learned that quickly. I often felt silly having to call my boss with a

heads up that I would be running late. She understood my situation and was extremely relaxed
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about it, but it was almost an unspoken critique in addition to when she has spoken to me about

it. My work quality critque came from when I handed in a marketing brochure and there was a

small misspelling or displacement of allignment on the graphics. They were little details that I

would not notice immediately, in which I would not always notice. This happened enough that

my supervisor told me that as the largest form of critique she could give me, would be double

check my work. From that point on, I always made sure of my work before I handed it into her.

She effectively and respectfully relayed this critique to me. This became a parallel to my

academic classroom criticism. Espeacilly, with peer review and professor review of my english

papers. I often was told to read my work outloud before handing it in to distinguish the awkward

parts of my paper. Several times I would have sentence structure flow and misuse of word

mistakes. It came down to a final read through, which was double checking my work.