I have a habit of going through old diary entries frequently — not because I don’t appreciate the present enough, but because there’s something oddly comforting about looking back at a time when your thoughts and priorities and life itself were all very different. I recently found a diary entry I wrote in the beginning of 2020, when I was a college student and doing an internship at a digital marketing agency for the first time. I was over the moon that I had landed an actual paying internship doing what I love (copy and content) and overzealous about learning as much as I could. I wrote this right as my internship winded to an end.
“As it always is, my first internship at a digital marketing & advertising agency was an eye-opener. Up until I received an offer letter from BC Web Wise, I was doing multiple content writing internships while being a full-time engineering student. My breadth and depth of knowledge about marketing was limited to “Write well-researched and catchy blogs, and people will like, share and talk about it.” A busy 2 months later, I’ve charted out everything I got to get my hands dirty with in a little deck I titled “Aditi’s Internship Diary” and sent it out to my managers. Here’s an excerpt:
The most intriguing and challenging project out of these, was creating social media posts for KEI Wires & Cables. The target audience - homeowners, public transport corporations, electrical contractors - was one I was totally unfamiliar with. My manager presented me with a neat framework that I continue to follow to this day, while devising social media content.
- Divvy up the content buckets - in case of KEI Wires & Cables, these were topical, moment marketing, product and company announcements, product ads.
- Identify a couple of post ideas for each bucket.
- Keeping in mind best practices like “the best image copy is only 4-5 words long”, start writing your image and caption copies.
- Review, edit, review, edit.
Having a workflow displaced my panic, and allowed me to come up with relevant and catchy posts.”
Reading through this entry jostled up some slightly dormant passion for work. It’s time to start documenting my work, learnings and pestering my managers with all of it again.