Summer is upon us and it is time for another Roundpeg tradition, the arrival of our interns, along with their first blog posts.  Today, meet Jessica Weimer.

I think the first day jitters are pretty typical. I wouldn’t know, since this is my first day on any job doing anything important. But here I am, at an actual desk, ready to start my summer as an intern at Roundpeg. And I was told more than once that I wouldn’t be the “coffee fetcher.” For the most part, I’m probably overly excited. Thinking about the things this could lead to for me is unreal. Hopefully it will land me a comfortable position with a company for which I can contribute some relationship building skills and occasionally a killer written piece.

This fall, I’ll be going into my junior year at Indiana University. It’s crazy; I had “sophomore” half typed out and had to fix it. The last two years have flown. I’m studying Journalism with a concentration in Communication and Culture. That basically comes down to public relations and advertising. My dream job would be to work in social media and/or media relations for a well-known sports outlet. Yeah, I’m one of those girls who pretends to know a little something about football.

Every journalism professor I have had at Indiana University in recent years has been cooing about the emerging vitality of social media. Anyone remotely involved in corporate marketing and public relations has given me the spiel about how relevant this internship will be. I’m thrilled to have the opportunity just to be educated in this stuff, more than just tweeting and re-tweeting from my personal account about every other day. More goes into it than just that. I think a lot of it is about building relationships.

I hope, when summer is over (too soon to think about), that I can say I have built more than a few job references and portfolio stuffers. I hope I can say I learned so much about social media analytics, software, and techniques that it would blow any class material in Ernie Pyle Hall out of the water. I want to experience a real working atmosphere, with a side of fun and spontaneity. Most of all though, above anything else, I want to prove to myself that I can make a good impression on Clyde and Truman, the resident cats.  Biggest challenge of all: I was raised to be a dog person. This summer should prove to be an interesting one, full of new experiences and semi-stressful technology tutorials.