TQHP Final Reflection (Mellon)

As a recipient of the Mellon Foundation Humanities Internship Stipend, I was required to submit a final reflection of my internship experience.

Career Exploration

This internship experience fostered a sense of gratitude in me for my humanities education. Double minoring in sociology and communication and majoring in English culminated in this path I’ve found for myself in digital marketing. With communication, I’ve learned how to navigate different mediums for sharing information/media, and learned how to develop strategies for marketing and outreach. With English, I’ve learned how to craft a narrative and write compelling stories that will touch people’s hearts. And with sociology, I’ve learned about social issues that affect different communities and how to advocate for change. I’m proud of how far I’ve come since my freshman year when I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do in my career. Now I feel like I’ve found my place in helping organizations get their message out to spark change in the world.

The next step for me professionally is to get established in an organization that needs my skills. I am graduating this semester, so after taking some time off for some rest and relaxation, I will be job hunting, preferably with non-profits, healthcare providers, or governmental agencies. My mission in life is to help people, especially those disenfranchised, and I believe my work will be best done with an organization whose values align with mine. I’ve already received a soft job offer from a client I worked with this semester, the Earth Viability Center, as a social media manager and outreach specialist. I would love to continue my work with them, and I look forward to growing and learning more in my field.

Integrated Learning

This semester, I took a course called Strategic Communication Campaigns to learn more about how marketing specialists operate. In that class, I completed a service-learning project with a client, the Earth Viability Center, in which my team and I developed an outreach campaign to promote their platform, Place4Us.net. This project and my internship were very similar. In both, I established the marketing strategy for the organization as well as produced outreach materials for TQHP/EVC to use after my time with them was up. This was also a lot like my previous internship with ODU’s Office of Counseling Services – being the first in my position, I forged the foundation of how the organization would communicate with their target audiences. In TQHP’s case, I realized the organization had a unique advantage of being one of the only ones documenting local queer history, and so it could establish itself as the subject matter expert when sharing information. It could also use its platform to advocate for queer rights, and so I created social media posts which were relevant to current political issues concerning LGBTQ+ people.

A humanities education – particularly an English major – gave me the advantage of understanding history through storytelling. As I conducted research in TQHP’s archives to find content to create, I quickly realized there was a story to be told, one that was told in each and every event in Tidewater’s queer history. This is the story of the LGBTQ+ community’s resilience: no matter what discrimination threatens the safety of its people, no matter what queer spaces are lost, queer people find a way to care for each other and get through it together. When Norfolk’s gay newspaper, Our Own, was removed from public libraries because of bigotry, so many Virginians used their voice to speak up for what they believed was right. They were not afraid to point out how this act of homophobia was intended to silence them, and that they would not surrender. Fast forward to today when transgender rights are under fire by the current administration, and it became apparent that this story needed to be told. Using my skills in archival research, writing, and video editing, I produced a docuseries which would uplift the community, reminding us of how far we have come. It’s important, now more than ever, that we take note of how acts of resistance and solidarity allowed us to achieve the progress we have today.

Professional Communication

            My internship supervisor, Cathleen Rhodes, complimented me on my professionalism, remarking that it is one of my many strengths. She requested I make a section in the onboarding document I created for the next intern wherein I explain how to act as a professional in the field of marketing & outreach. I listed four main tips: make good use of your time, ask questions, be mindful of how you’re representing the organization, and set goals. In my experience working with non-profits, there is usually little, if any, budget for a marketing team, and so I worked with very little supervision. This meant I had to manage my own time, but also know when to reach out for feedback. It’s a delicate balance to make sure you’re not overwhelming your client with questions, but you want to be sure you’re representing them well and crafting the right message for their audience. As for setting goals, it gives you and the organization something to reflect on. If the initial goals set were achieved, having the procedures used to reach them written down gives the next person something to work with and improve. If they were not, then you can look at how things can be approached differently going forward.

            One thing I noted in my last reflection with ODU’s Counseling Services was that I learned cold calling and perseverance were necessary communication skills to have in any field. This was true for my work with TQHP as well. Professor Rhodes thanked me for being persistent in setting up this internship, as I had emailed her consistently throughout the previous semester to ask about the opportunity and offer my assistance. She’s a very busy person as a professor and as the founder/director of TQHP, and so offering this internship (and three others) might have been something that had slipped her mind if I hadn’t been so present. At the end of this spring semester, TQHP had three interns and a graduate assistant, each performing different roles. Professor Rhodes also said in meeting with the internship academy, she’d learned TQHP is likely one of the few on-campus organizations to have this many interns. As we met one last time for ice cream, I felt a sense of pride and gratitude that my skills in interpersonal communication were able to bring us all together and establish new opportunities for future interns.

Final Thoughts

            The most rewarding part of this whole experience is how validating it has been for me to step into my own, from a student to a professional. Both organizations I worked with this semester expressed they were so grateful to have worked with me, that my professionalism and drive were immeasurably valuable, and that they felt inspired to know young people were ready and willing to create a better world. This meant a lot to me, as I’ve always wanted to put my skills to use to advocate for justice and equity, and I just needed someone to give me a chance to prove I could do it. Not only did I achieve this goal, but I received so much kindness and affirmation from my supervisors that I understood their needs and went above and beyond to deliver. Getting my bachelor’s degree has been nine years in the making, and I finally feel like I am able to pass on knowledge to others, offering value to an organization and to those who will follow behind. I feel confident that wherever I go next, I will be able to make a difference. I am ready to get to work.