Learning the Ropes

So I have been interning for two days now, and I am already exhausted. So far this summer, I have made the transition from being on academic overdrive at school, to practically nothing for a month, to now, having to get up at 7:30 and commute to Manhattan to make it to Chelsea by 9:30.  The hardest part for me so far has been staying awake, if anything. On the bright side, I am loving my job. My boss is incredibly helpful. I sit at a desk just next to hers and she has been guiding me through everything. I work for a company called OXO. If it doesn’t sound familiar, I guarantee you have used one of their kitchen gadgets at one point or another.  While I am at the NYC office, which has everything from engineers, to business people, I am a Public Relations Intern. Basically what I have learned from working here is learning the difference between Marketing and PR, which I thought were a lot more similar. While marketing is to attract the consumer, PR takes the goal of trying to get information about your products published in the media. Although I am new to this, I really have learned a lot so far this week. The first day for me, was essentially learning to use the software and websites, creating order forms for samples and learning about the product. Today, my boss and I worked on coverage reports. Essentially, we have digital records of when products by the company have been mentioned in different big time magazines and articles. We collect and scan those and then create documents with hyperlinks and send them to editors. But we don’t just send them everything. It takes thinking about which articles they would like to see, who is reading them, and how many people. And there is a lot of writing involved to the editors once this is done. As of now, I am finding this experience very informative and really enjoying my time at OXO.