Internship Contest Winners

Winners:
Erin J. Mansfield
Soma Majumder
Aaron D. Neufeld

1st Place Erin J. Mansfield Spanish Language & Literature Major Journalism Minor Stony Brook University Class of 2012 When Erin started her job as a legislative intern for US Senator Bernie Sanders last summer, she had a completely different view of US politics. But after an eye-opening experience in Washington DC, Erin began to understand the intricacies of politics beyond what is seen on TV. Read more about her experience below.

My Summer in Bernie’s Office
By Erin Mansfield

I spent the summer of 2011 working in the office of Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent Senator from Vermont. Bernie is sometimes chastised for being a democratic socialist and most well known for his one-man filibuster against the Bush tax cuts in late 2010. In his Washington, D.C. office, I was a legislative intern. My duties included sorting mail and faxes on a daily basis, drafting constituent letters, and assisting legislative assistants (policy experts) with specific projects on a regular basis. The exposure that I received in Bernie’s office was incomparable to anything I had seen before. I learned more than I could have imagined.

For starters, Congress is a lot different than it seems from the outside. Although on TV the government may seem like a bunch of people split between good ideas and bad ideas, actual day-to-day knowledge dwarfs that optimistic analysis. Conflicts tend to appear as a two-sided debate, but a few weeks working on Capitol Hill will make you realize how much political propaganda is spun by the right, and how little Democrats are actually able to control their debate. Indeed, the debt crisis was not a crisis by any means but a fabricated catastrophe in order to draw attention to a disingenuously dysfunctional Congress—that is, a Republican Speaker of the House who is smart enough to spin everything in front of him and corrupt enough to act like he is doing it for a greater good. On the flip side, any single Senator can block a cloture vote on a bill; that means that without having to filibuster, a Senator can delay a vote for a week. With 100 senators and 52 weeks in the year, now try complaining about how there is no national health care. Given that new knowledge of Capitol Hill, I was able to learn about legislation.

As a personal and professional goal, I made it my mission to understand the federal government’s role in health care. I did it the hard way. From an early point, I asked the legislative assistant (policy expert) for health care to give me any kind of work to do. He gave me seemingly menial tasks of organizing bills that the Senator had co-sponsored into spreadsheet and summarizing what certain groups were looking for in legislation. While these could have been the most boring projects, they ended up being part of an exhaustive route to perfect my legislative research skills and learn about the intricacies of the National Institute of Health and Department of Defense research funding. Did you know that tacking on medical research to a defense bill is an express lane to better government funding? From one socialist to another, talk about a much better use of a 600-billion-dollar annual budget.

However, this knowledge would have been impossible without the incredible staff who worked in Bernie’s office. I loved spending eight hours per day in the mixture of brilliant staffers who epitomized both congeniality and professionalism. Geeks to the core, each person who walked by my desk was happy to talk to me about the latest legislative issue that came into the office, so long as the person had the time to talk. Anyone who did not have the time for chatter still had the time for a warm greeting: Bernie responded to being called Bernie, and every important person who walked by my desk remembered my name and to say good morning. Among all the hustle and bustle of working in the upper house of the United States Congress, being just humble and friendly as you are good at your job is a wonderful attribute that the entire staff cherished. I look forward to a career where I exemplify those same traits.

I learned incredible things in Washington. I learned about the truth in our government. I found an amazing opportunity to grow through hands-on experience, and I was able to do so in a healthy and fun work environment. From here on out, I am interested in either continuing my work in government and using the skills I have gained to enhance my career. My internship with Bernie Sanders’s office changed me in ways I will never forget. I am very thankful to the staff and the Senator for the amazing opportunity I was given. And while we may be frustrated with the direction the country is going in, I can say first-hand that there are plenty of decent, hardworking people who are genuinely out to make a difference in the world. Bernie is one of them.

2nd Place Soma Majumder Health Science (Healthcare Management) Major Business Management Minor Stony Brook University Class of 2012 Some students go beyond the mere duties of an internship, and discover themselves in the process. Soma’s internship with Dreambelle.com helped her explore her interest in social media, but it also helped her discover her passion for public relations. She is now pursuing a career in PR. Read more about her experience below.

Soma Majumder

The internship that I had for the Summer of 2011 opened up my eyes to the world of social media and how effective it can be to the marketing and public relations field. I was a social media intern for www.Dreambelle.com, which is an up and coming website that creates an inspirational space of love, faith, creativity, inner beauty, peace, courage, and the pursuit of dreams to empower young women and men. Public Relations is the art of analyzing trends and implementing planned programs of action that serve the goodwill of the organization and the public interest. Social media plays such a huge role in how a company is perceived by the public because it is everywhere and almost everyone in the world have access to social media, be it Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, or Tumblr. This internship changed my perspective on social media because I had thought that it was only an outlet for expressing an individual’s creativity and keeping in touch with friends, but social media is more than that. It is a powerful tool to help you network and reach out to the public about your product in a more personal way than just advertising. For example, before the website was launched, the other interns and I had to create a fan base on facebook and twitter. On facebook, we targeted people in groups that had similar interests as ours and on twitter we used a marketing tool called Tweet spinner that let us schedule tweets ahead of time and it also let us target people within our criteria. We used Tumblr as a visual medium for our target market because it allowed us a little more creativity than Twitter.

During this internship I learned a lot of new things, one of which was that we could direct traffic to our website using social media tools such as StumbleUpon. The way we directed traffic to our website was by getting as many “Discoveries” as we can, which was to “like” an article through StumbleUpon that nobody liked before, and when we “discovered” something we got to tag the discovery we made, so that whenever somebody searched the tags we wrote, our website would pop up in the search.

This internship influenced my career decision to be in the Public Relations field because it showed me how important social media is to the perception of a company through the public’s eyes. It is a very powerful tool because most Americans nowadays are on multiple social media outlets and in the Public Relations field you always have to be up to date on the trend so that you can deliver more effectively and more efficiently. Also, during this internship I had a lot of fun and I looked forward to working there even though it was an unpaid internship just because I loved what I was doing and even if I stumbled a little bit, my supervisor and peers were there to help me out, so that by the end of the internship, I gained valuable experience and learned something new.

3rd Place Aaron D. Neufeld Cinema and Cultural Studies Major Media Arts Minor Stony Brook University Class of 2012 As a web/digital arts intern for Clear Channel Communications, Aaron learned to use software such as Photoshop to and design logos, and Dreamweaver to design web pages. He also got to meet radio celebrities in person! Aaron’s designs are still used by Clear Channel today. Read more about his experience below.

Aaron D. Neufeld
THR 488/ Internship
Summer 2011

I first showed up to my internship pretty nervous and anxious to begin. I was starting an internship for Clear Channel Communications—the radio division, in Manhattan, New York. I showed up dressed in slacks and a button down shirt. It was then that I was introduced to my supervisor, Jaime. Jaime told me that the dress code was casual and I need not dress so fancy. It was a very relaxed atmosphere, which made me very comfortable there.

During the first week I was also asked what my learning objectives would be. I said I would love to learn how to better use Photoshop and how the day-to-day dealings of a website work. Based on my objectives, I was given assignments, which would help me build strengths in these categories. During my time there I was given various tasks on Adobe Photoshop—to resize images, change file formatting, send newly formatted images through e-mails and uploading reformatted images to their database. I also was assigned to create several logos for the various radio websites being Z100 (100.3), WKTU (103.5), POWER 105.1, Q104.3, and 106.7 LITE FM.

I was also tasked with taking control of the photo tab for all five radio sites. It became my weekly regular duty to control everything going on under the photo tabs. This means that I was responsible for constantly updating the photo galleries to reflect the latest in-studio guests, in-studio performances, radio station appearances at concerts, clubs or public events, etc. It was my duty to make sure that all photos were uploaded in a timely fashion to the correct albums and given the correct titles. These albums then had to be hyperlinked so that you could access them from the site’s homepage. The album also had to contain links redirecting to other photo galleries of fans, or perhaps lyrics to the songs belonging to the artist in the gallery. Proper photography credit had to also be given to the photos within the gallery.

This became a regular task for me along with updating portions of the contest section of the sites. I controlled the points achieved for answering the ‘Question of the Day’ of which I created both the questions and answers. This was technical and involved some coding which I also learned during my internship through being introduced to Adobe Dreamweaver.

During my time at Clear Channel, I was able to meet the on-air radio celebrities whose voices I knew so well but whose faces I never knew. I was able to see them do what they do best and it was really inspiring. I was also able to meet famous musical artists and celebrities who came into the studios for interviews.

While I did have actual work to complete and deadlines to meet, it was all fun and there wasn’t much pressure. Everyone seemed to be in constant good-spirits and the coffee was free all day. It was the closest experience to working in Hollywood! I feel very achieved with the work I accomplished while interning at ClearChannel. My work can still be seen on a daily basis on the various radio station websites. My logos are visible and my galleries are neatly organized. My work can be seen here so I don’t feel like it was for nothing. It was clearly needed and my products were utilized in production.

I enjoyed learning about what the other people at the station do for a living and seeing how a radio station runs on a day-to-day basis and how their websites work alongside them. I learned what producers do and how there are multiple producers dealing with various sections of the station. Jaime, my supervisor, is the Mornings Online Producer, dealing with contests and web information while other producers deal strictly with graphic design and work strictly in-studio, developing on-air content for the radio DJs. There are really so many different types of jobs in specific areas of media, which gave me certainty that there is something out there for me and got my appetite up for the future!

Special Thanks to the Faculty Student Association and Dave & Buster’s for providing the prizes.