Internship Day 3

So I'm now three days into my internship. After a couple of talks with Ken, we have my plan for the next few weeks more finalized.

As I said before, I will be doing advertising in Kibera as well as teaching youth in the slum. This week, we are doing the basics of advertising and strategic communication. After my introductory class on Monday, we discussed the basics of background research in reporting and advertising yesterday, and then I sent them out on assignment to go interview a local business as if they were to go advertise for them.

This morning they came back and presented on their findings. We then went into strategy of planning for advertising. I had them create mental webs about the companies they interviewed and come up with ideas. I then had them go back into their groups and answer some questions on strategy like who are they trying to reach, why, how will they reach them, what are the one to two key points their audience needs to know, etc.

The rest of this week, we'll talk about ad placements and also about how to write a lead. Even though we're doing advertising this week, I want them to be able to come up with ideas on how to engage an audience. Then on Monday we'll do creative work.

While this is going on, Ken will be teaching them about video shooting and editing. So next week after they've learned about these aspects of advertising, they will go out to a business in Kibera and create an advertisement for them. I'm excited to see where this goes.

After the next couple weeks, I'm going to transition from advertising into story writing. We want to give the kids some skills to maybe get a job, so I want to help them with their ability to tell a story and their writing ability. So that whole week we'll learn different aspects of writing a story.

The fourth and fifth weeks of my internship, we will be overseeing them making multiple projects. At this point, they should know more about video work from Ken and the basics of writing a story and advertising for me, so we'll have them do a couple stories and advertisements as projects over these two weeks. My final week, we hope to teach them how to do basic web work and to upload their videos to a web site.

While doing this teaching work, I hope to also make a couple advertisements of my own. I'd like to have some for my portfolio and be able to have them for when I go home.

All in all, I think this could be a great few weeks. I'm excited and simultaneously a little overwhelmed with what we're going to do. I've had to frantically go back through my journalism notes to remember topics to address with the kids and how to properly address them. In fact, I've spent half of my work hours this week doing lesson plans...not exactly what I was expecting from a communications internship. But I'm excited to see what these next few weeks bring and hope you're all doing well!