I would like to give a warm welcome to Nicole Coughlin, new marketing intern at Mary Free Bed Rehabilitation Hospital. Back in my own college days, I had several internships (Anderson University PR office, Butler University SID office, Indianapolis Indians SID office, the list goes on) and I truly love to have an intern to both teach and learn from. I like to ask my interns for a few words at the beginning of each semester as to what they would like to learn, experience and see. Nicole’s new intern blog follows below.

What do I want out of my Mary Free Bed marketing internship?
By Nicole Coughlin, Cornerstone University

Public relations is not a career you can practice just thinking about in theory, it’s active, you need to be able to have a goal and work towards it. In school we make campaigns and get all excited about them just to give it to a professor and walk away from it. It’s sad. I am ready to create something and then do it.

I want a chance to get my hands dirty and really learn what public relations is truly about. Create things that will be seen by the public, influence perception, and cause action. I want to see in real time how people react to social media posts, instead of hypothetical numbers. I am excited to take the things that I have been practicing in school, like blogs and social media posts, videography and finding target markets, and see how what I know holds up in the real world. I want to see how the different marketing appeals actually play out in real world situations as opposed to looking at other companies examples and thinking backwards through the process. I want to work on the preparation of a campaign and then actually be able to see it through.

I am also excited to dabble in things I haven’t had the opportunity to yet. The idea of being able to work on a website, something that is so necessary to a company, is exciting and nerve racking all at the same time, but in a good way. I am also excited to work with designing posts and images like on the T.V screens throughout the building. Right now I just want to be able to work on as much as possible.

I saw this internship online and was so impressed with all of the areas that I would get to help with. Even just within the description it talked about having a chance to write blog posts, help with different social media sites, get to work with the website a little bit, and more that I can’t even remember off the top of my head now. It seemed like a challenge that I was ready to take on.

I want to learn these things but I am most ready to learn all the things that I don’t even know are an option to learn at this point. Even just the ins and outs of what happens like seeing how an idea goes from someone mentioning a story to completing it and finding where the most effective way to share that I’ve heard from all around that you learn more in an internship then ever possible in school. I am just ready to take the next step towards reality in this way.