Summer Internships

Devan Young ’13 spent his summer as an intern at Fox Sports in Los Angeles. All of the Fox interns created a video about the experience to wrap up their summer.

Young was a co-host for the show. Check out the video.

AJ Akinribade ’15 – “Welcome  to LaLa Land!” My internship with the Indy Film Festival has been nothing short of that and I am beyond grateful to have had the opportunity to experience the festival from the ground up. I would like to thank Wabash alumni as well as the Lily Business Grant founders for their wondrous donations and support.

So what’s the Indianapolis International Film Festival? The 2012 Indianapolis International Film Festival (IIFF or Indy Film Fest.) is a non-profit organization where the love for films and filmmaking is shared in a fun ten day event called “Welcome to LaLa Land” going from July 19-29th. Our organization is a venue where big-time, low budget, locally shot, or from around the globe features and shorts can be discussed and enjoyed by our own Indianapolis community. We voice the stories of bright, young filmmakers who share the same passion for story-telling and filmmaking as our film loving audience does; an audience who enjoys quirky comedies, romantic comedies, dramas, thrillers, documentaries, animation, etc. During the ten day festival we do all from movie screenings to director’s Q&A, from filmmaking workshops to evening social gatherings where everybody from filmmakers, aspiring filmmakers, film buffs or just the regular film goer can take part in and enjoy. We simply play host to the art of film within our great city of Indianapolis!

During my eight weeks of working with the festival I had a wide range of responsibilities. As the operations intern I learned about everything that made the festival run. I communicated with filmmakers and sponsors through constant email threads, picked up and delivered festival packages, oversaw volunteers, etc. I even did what some may call the grunt work left for the intern, the tedious office work of punching numbers into excel.

The weeks leading up to the festival Wyatt Lewis (senior Wabash student who also interned for the Indy Film Festival) worked together to manage many tasks and projects. We worked with software such as dropbox, formstack, and withoutabox to communicate and update festival files among all the staff members.

During the festival I continued to work with those softwares in order to keep our records updated as well as direct filmmakers and sponsors throughout the ten day event. I also teamed up with non-staff volunteers at our box office to help sell tickets, pressed play with our film projectionists, and communicated with venue staff to make sure everything about the festival was running smoothly.

Other than having a dashing good time with the festival and learning so much, the one main thing that I gained from this experience was, “Do what you love with a passion!” Because of the festival being a non-profit organization, even the board members are just volunteers themselves. To me, the greatest aspect of the festival is that it is run by ordinary people just like you and me, who just happen to have an extraordinary passion for film. The festival is built on their combined and genuine effort. They go through all of the hard work for fun; they do it because they love it. That’s special to me. The consistent passion and drive I saw in the tired faces of my boss and co-workers during our late night office hours did it for me. To love what I do is the most important advice I’ve gained from this experience to give my future.

Bailey Combs ’15 – I would like to start of this post by thanking the Lilly Endowment and especially the Wabash Alumni for providing the funding for this internship. By doing so, they have proven themselves to be far superior in their love of their alma mater than their unfortunate friends to the south. I say this because the other intern at the Montgomery County Rotary Jail Museum, my place of employment this summer, is a rising senior at that “other college” and is not being compensated for her time as I am. So thank you for allowing me to save up some money this summer so this fall my Wabash experience will be more memorable as a result.

I chose to go work at the museum because it opened two possible future careers for me. One being a small business owner, because the Rotary Jail is a small, private entity, or utilizing my future history degree to become a museum curator, both of which I can achieve through a liberal arts education. In accordance with the guidelines of the internship, I have spent time creating eye-catching advertising and flyers for the museum, researched potential clients for the museum’s paranormal tours, and will soon be overhauling the museum’s website to incorporate this research. I even found a way for the museum to advertise at the largest paranormal convention in the country in Lexington, Kentucky, later this year. I also proved instrumental in increasing sales in the museum’s gift shop over the last two months. In addition to the goals of the business internship, I also managed to achieve my personal goals of exploring a career in museums.

I loved absorbing information about the museum as well as having the opportunity to talk to people who worked there back when it was an operational jail. I also had the chance to explore the museum’s large collection of items with the new curator. This gave me the material to prove myself as a valuable tour guide. In addition to this, I had the wonderful opportunity to not only help run but plan two summer camps at the museum this summer as well. The activities ranging from art classes to museum tours to tea parties.

This has been a lop-sided positive experience for me this summer. The real setback I have had this summer was opening up the museum for business. Since I lived in Crawfordsville and none of the other employees did, I had to open the museum up two days in a row a few weeks ago and I forgot the security pass-code for the alarm system. As a result, I had to explain to the police why they were called in. Luckily, I have overcome my fear of opening up the museum and have done so without police involvement since that time.

Energized by this summer, I plan to continue my liberal arts education in hopes of continuing my dream as a small business owner or museum curator.

Seton Goddard ’15 – For the last nine weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to work as intern at DirectEmployers Association on the northwest side of Indianapolis. DirectEmployers Association offers an offshoot of the first online job boards, which eventually led to websites like Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com. Their primary website, US.jobs, is a central component to the work they do with over 120,000 employers around the world. DirectEmployers (DE) uses various forms of technology to syndicate all of these employers’ jobs to hundreds of other websites, where job seekers can easily access them. DE has also maximized the opportunities provided by Search Engine Optimization (SEO) by closely analyzing the numbers of jobs to which job seekers are led when their search begins by utilizing a search engine like Google or Bing. Because it has been found that the overwhelming majority of job seekers use search engines rather than CareerBuilder or Monster to find jobs, the use of SEO has led to a lot of success for major corporations around the world in the area of human resources.

My role this summer has involved working primarily in the areas of Member Services, Strategic Partnerships, and quality assurance. Even though DE works with thousands of employers, the majority of the work we do is done with companies who pay to become members of our association. When corporations become members, they’re provided with a plethora of services, which is where Member Services and quality assurance comes into play. Throughout the summer, I’ve had the opportunity to make sure that our members are getting the most for their money by performing regular audits and correcting errors along the way.

As someone who is interested in healthcare, this has been great experience. In addition to seeing all of the work that DE does with healthcare providers and organizations, it’s also given me a lot of insight into hiring processes, and even the significant value in outcomes research, which is meaningful in all areas of work. I was also given the task of working with a fellow intern to coordinate a weeklong career development program for underserved students in the Indianapolis area. This has been a pleasure, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the work I’ve done with it. The program, which is taking place this week, has been very successful, and those of us who have worked with the students know that this is making a big difference in their outlook on their futures. Working at DirectEmployers has also afforded me the opportunity to put many of my Wabash-gained skills into practice in the real world. Having the ability to write well and communicate well has benefitted me immensely, and my colleagues and supervisors have taken notice.

On that note, I would like to thank the Lilly Endowment and DirectEmployers Association for funding this internship, as well as Betsy Knott and Seth Flater ’10 who worked together to provide me with this internship. Additionally, I owe a huge “thank you” to Pat, Mattie, Emily, Nick ‘15, Erin, and Noah Boyce (along with the rest of the Indianapolis area Boyce/Birch families) for putting up with me while they hosted me at their home in Indianapolis this summer.

Wyatt Lewis ’13 – So, this summer I was lucky enough to secure an internship through Wabash College with the Indy Film Fest, and I think it’s been the best work experience I’ve ever had. But let me tell you: it started off with a bang! I spent my first few days working our booth at the Broad Ripple Art Fair — the philosophy was that if I had to talk about the festival to a horde of strangers, I’d certainly be up to speed on festival logistics by the end of the weekend. And it certainly worked! By the end of the weekend, I began to feel like part of the team. On Wednesday, I worked the ticket booth at the IMA for the Indy Film Fest screening of INDIE GAME, a fantastic documentary about independent game developers. Afterwards, the audience had an opportunity for a Q&A session with the directors via Skype. On Thursday, I helped set up the Earth House for the film fest screening of the Bellflower, the final film in the Spring Film Series. And on Friday, I helped out with the “Nooner,” a free, once-a-month lunch-time screening of a handful of shorts.

So while my first week at the film fest was a supercharged introduction and crash course, the rest of the internship was much different. I quickly discovered that the above-mentioned events were more or less the last scheduled events (except for our Sneak Peek and another Nooner event) before the festival. The next month and a half would be spent doing nothing but racing against the clock to acquire sponsorships, partnerships, consent forms, films, and more. The pace quickened considerably, but the hectic nature of the work gave me a lot more autonomy than I expected. As my boss Lisa Trifone, the Festival Managing Director, pointed out, we had to work whenever there was work to be done. This often meant finishing up early on a Thursday or Friday only to spend all day Saturday and half of Sunday at the Film Fest office after receiving lots of mail.

But, as I mentioned earlier, I ended up with a great deal of autonomy, and this is what made the internship fantastic. Lisa gave me several projects to manage, and I was often able to set my own hours, so long as I filled a 40-hour week and completed the work that needed to be done. But the best part about being given projects was the chance to really take ownership of the jobs given to me. These projects included compiling a list of organizations and emailing them to invite them to the fest, emailing several organizations for sponsorships, asking for donations and using them to build VIP swag bags for the filmmakers, helping build the Festival Genius website, contacting filmmakers for film information, working with Lodge Design (our marketing company) to get them appropriate hi-res stills from filmmakers, and monitoring DVD traffic to make sure that all of the festival jury members, bloggers, and film critics from NUVO, the Indianapolis Star, and the Indianapolis Business Journal received all the films they needed on time. I found myself simultaneously thrilled and intimidated by having so much to juggle and continually forced to find my own answers to problems. There was no rule-book for the internships, and when I asked my boss questions, she often replied with a sincere, “I don’t know—what do you think?”

So while it ended up being surprisingly exhausting work, the internship was also incredibly rewarding. Even though we spent a lot of really late nights at the Earth House office frantically trying to catch up with the growing pile of work, I always left the office in the evening feeling proud to be working with such a great group of people on a worthwhile project. I will actually be missing the festival proper—I knew this would be the case when I first signed up for the internship because of prior work obligations in NJ, but at the time I didn’t mind too much. However, now that I’ve invested so much personal time and effort (and seen some of the films!), I’m incredibly disappointed to be missing the festival. But as I told my boss, working with the Film Festival has definitely whetted my thirst, and I plan to be back around in Indy for the Fall Film Series!

So I think that in the end the internship really gave me a chance to contribute in a meaningful way—no pushing papers or pulling staples this summer (which I literally did last summer—ask me about it sometime). On top of that, I feel plugged into Indy in a way that I’ve never felt before—I never realized how small the arts community is—or how quickly it’s growing! Since our office is located in the Earth House, I continually ran into people from First Friday, Big Car, PUP, NUVO, and other arts organizations. It was fantastic to see how tight-knit the arts community is and discover just how much is going on in Indy. In fact, I didn’t even know there was an Indy Film Fest before the internship (and no, it’s a different film fest than the Heartland film fest), so I’m really thankful just for the opportunity to get involved with Indy on a deeper level and really engage with the community at large.

Last, I want to thank both my boss Lisa Trifone at the film fest, and also give a huge thanks to the Lilly Business Internship fund for making this whole summer possible. As a rising senior unsure about his future, I’m seriously considering nonprofit work for the first time in my life—so thank you to everyone who helped open up new opportunities for me.

Actually, one last, last thing: if you do love movies, you should think about coming out to the Film Festival! The festival runs July 19-29 at the IMA and the Earth House, and we’ll be showing over 100 independent films. Each film will screen twice—so you should be able to find a screening you can attend for any film that interests you. Go to here and click on films for more information—you can find trailers, photos, special events, scheduled discussions with filmmakers, and all the logistical information you need there. And stay posted on about the Indy Film Fest throughout the year to find information about all of our other yearly programming.