Challenges, Skills, and the Future

 

Studying abroad is an experience in which students don’t just learn in the classroom. Most of the education is actually enhanced life skills and personal growth through cross-cultural experiences. Personally, I observed significant career-oriented self-development through my professional writing internship with Sant’Anna Institute in Sorrento, Italy. During this internship, I created content for the school’s social media, blog, and website. While I encountered many cultural differences in Italy, my biggest challenge was the less structured pace of life. As opposed to the exact schedules and immense communication in the United States, I had to adjust to relaxed scheduling with last minute changes and less communication. This allowed me to appreciate the value of flexibility in a new perspective. 

I have always been a planner. Like many busy college students, I like to have a set schedule and a to-do list to stay organized and on top of my tasks. However, my experience interning in Italy required me to adjust to a spontaneous pace of life and a looser schedule. In my previous experience as a copy editor for Elon Job Network and as a resident assistant, I had to be on call. This meant that I was available to respond to others’ needs and answer questions at a moment’s notice. This internship allowed me to experience a new kind of flexibility in my schedule. I learned how to quickly adapt to a new schedule by switching the order of tasks to be completed and always being able to figure out an alternative assignment to work on instead of what I had planned. New tasks were sometimes assigned with a close deadline like when Instagram captions needed to be altered for that same day or flyers were wanted for events taking place in a few days and needed to be announced.

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I can now easily move tasks around and come up with new ideas to work on instead of the previous plan. Adaptability has also helped my writing skills. As an intern, I have very often switched back and forth between different forms of communication. This constant adjustment from blog posts to social media to flyers pushed me to consider my target audience before writing each piece, even if I had written similar content before. Even within these tasks, I focused on multiple audiences. When writing social media captions, I focused on students for Instagram, parents for Facebook, and the professional community for LinkedIn. Targeting specific audiences is a skill I’ve discussed in previous PWR classes, but I’d never switched audiences so often before. Even for my internship last summer, I edited articles for the same type of audience and on the same platform the entire time. This constant change in the tone of my writing and the awareness of my audiences has improved the speed of production and focus of my writing on multiple platforms.

I also gained more independence by taking initiative to begin communication with supervisors more often and explore my creativity. In the past, I’ve received specific instructions detailing exactly how to complete my work, but this internship was more up to me with what I wanted to learn and what content I was motivated to create. Therefore, I was allowed to use my personal experience and interests to design flyers, write blog posts, and brainstorm and write social media posts. With this independence, I took initiative to consider what content would be fresh and informative to my student audience on Instagram. I listened to other students discuss culture shock and the surprising differences between the United States and Italy and came up with the Italian Culture 101 topic. I told my supervisor that this thread would educate both prospective and current students about Italian culture and would catch their attention in a new way on a page that had already been active for a while. One of these posts taught students how to shop at Italian markets like a local and included information about a class field trip to Naples. Students who are excited about cooking great Italian food or love fresh produce would love to know about these markets. Italian Culture 101 is the content I am most proud of creating because I thought about my own and listened to other students’ questions about Italy and took initiative to communicate a cultural need with my supervisors to ease the anxiety of future students. 

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Along with my audience focus, I also continued to develop my editing and graphic design skills that I learned in PWR courses. Topics such as the CRAP principles for design and you-attitude have guided my work in this internship and worked together to create the best pieces. The interrelationship between PWR topics is very helpful in my work because knowledge from classes builds off of each other to make problem-solving and revising easier. In the case of creating the Spring Break Instagram Challenge flyer, I considered my audience and the CRAP principles of design in order to make a visually engaging flyer. The participation instructions added an abundance of words to the flyer, but I knew that busy students would want to get all of the necessary information as quickly as possible and may be daunted by having to read an entire paragraph. Therefore, I broke down steps into a numbered list and bolded the winner’s prize, so the audience’s attention would be drawn to the reward. This way, the instructions were divided into four simple steps, and students interested in the free pizza night would be motivated to read the whole flyer. 

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One topic from PWR classes that I did not expect to help me in this internship was learning how to use style guides. However, when I was editing Sant’Anna Institute’s website, I realized that future writers and editors might miss stylistic changes I made to each page. Thinking back to my Publishing and Editing I class, I remembered how easy it was to look up style in a guide when I forgot whether or not to use periods in abbreviations or include the Oxford comma. To resolve any future confusion and to remind myself throughout the semester what style I was following, I created a document with Sant’Anna’s own style guide.

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Throughout my professional writing internship, I have explored my own work and life values and been influenced by the values of Italian culture. I prefer the leniency in Italian culture because of the trust between coworkers. I appreciate the understanding that assignments will be completed in a timely manner even if the schedule is not exact, creating a more relaxed environment. Trust is a value that is becoming more prominent in the United States with remote work. Some jobs that were previously in the office have no need to be in person but remain that way so that employees can be micromanaged and checked in on. However, Italian culture demonstrates that more independence and trust creates a less stressful work environment which I believe fosters more motivation, creativity, and work of a higher quality. The values and skills I’ve developed through my internship connected lessons from all of my professional writing classes to prepare me for future careers. I am grateful to have experienced the interrelationship between my professional writing skills and to expand my knowledge about career values before joining the workforce. If any students are deciding whether or not they want to complete an internship while abroad, I highly recommend it. You’ll learn a lot about yourself along with the culture.