Digital Marketing Internship: living in Excel spreadsheets and battling the imposter syndrome
By Vojta, BSc Geology and Physical Geography
Hello! I am back with another update on my internship!
WEEK THREE
The main task of week three was metrics analysis. What’s that, you ask? Let me explain…
Remember the last time you got an email showing the newest products from your favourite brand? It was most likely full of nice photos and links meant to grab your attention and make you click on them. Well, a metrics analysis of such emails looks at how many people did exactly that. And how many people did not. And how many people didn’t even bother to open the email in the first place. These are all very important measures of how well (or poorly) each email performs because it will inform the following marketing steps of the company. The School sends out a good number of emails to offer holders and applicants and it was up to me to track how they did. Spoiler alert: better than expected.
Similarly, I looked at past events the School organised for prospective students: open days, Q&A sessions, offer holder days, you name it. My task was to organise the names by their region and most of the time that meant I had to manually count the individual number of entries belonging to each region. Not even the filter function in Excel could help me here! One spreadsheet had nearly 1,800 rows filled with names – now that is what I would call Excel hell. Exc-hell. But after countless spreadsheets later, I was finally finished.
WEEK FOUR
The focus of week four were our social media campaigns. We are finally getting ready to create some content! First on the list are interviews with our academic staff: we want to highlight the research they are doing and how it integrates into their teaching. It is easily one of the most exciting things I’ve worked on so far! But a lot of preparation needs to be done before I can go out and start filming. This includes selecting and contacting the people to try to get them involved (sidenote: an Excel spreadsheet is a very useful method to track who I’ve contacted), buying equipment and planning the interview questions.
I also realised that I came up with most of the ideas that we will be working on and so essentially, I am the one who will influence the School’s presentation on social media. You know, the first thing that everyone sees. What if I don’t do a good enough job? What if nobody will like our posts? The imposter syndrome was here, and it was stronger than ever. The fact that I was supposed to present our ideas to the School Student Recruitment Committee did not help at all. What will they think?
Luckily, all my worries were gone as soon as I started presenting. It was great to see how much the academics were interested in our plans and even shared their own ideas for the content we could include.
To finish off the fourth week, I attended an Employ.ed on Campus meeting with other student interns from across the University to share some very useful ideas for problem-solving. We also realised we all have more or less the same problems: people don’t respond to emails quickly when we need them, Excel won’t cooperate and most of us are juggling more projects at the same time. It was nice to see I am not the only one facing these.
All in all, everything so far went much better than expected.
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(Photo by Firmbee.com on Unsplash)
(Photo by Firmbee.com on Unsplash)
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