Crafting posts to go on a blog and managing a page on social media – these were some things I never expected myself to do, especially in university. In fact, what I plan to do for a living rarely involves writing – unless if you count lines of code as ’sentences’ – and embarking on this internship purely out of interest and love for writing, I was excited but also quite scared to take up the responsibility.
“*GASP* I’m scared.”
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Looking back at the past 6 months, I wouldn’t say I did a very great job – I missed a few blog posts that I was planning to write, and by the end of my appointment I ran out of ideas on what to share with the residential community here at NUS. But the lessons I learned from the internship was nonetheless valuable. You might think, “Who doesn’t say that at the end of an internship?”, but working as a marketing communications intern for the Residential Life Facebook page and blog was an experience that gave me countless precious insights on interacting with people and creating content that really matters to them.
Once, I had made a mistake on greeting our subscribers at the start of Ramadan – we had a resident who thankfully corrected my typing error, and I couldn’t edit the post in time, so my manager, Bell, had to help me with it. Through that incident, I realized that I should be putting in more effort into perfecting my writing and not making any factually faulty or politically wrong statements – be it a 30-word Facebook post or a 600-words blog post.
“This is my experience summarized into one sentence.”
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Also, one of the most fun parts of the internship was figuring out what our residents wanted to see. I expected that posts on ‘Cool places to visit in the weekends’, ‘Great food spots’ or ‘Life hacks!’ would gain a lot of views, likes and shares – being an innocent and ignorant beginner to social media management, I expected a good 500 views and 100 likes on each of the posts. But the stats that Facebook gave me, at first, were – to be really honest – truly terrifying. It was a big challenge to reach more than 300 people, and contrary to my expectations, ‘Likes’ were extremely hard to get. I tried to seek for content that more residents would want to see on our page and spent time trying to understand what preferences our subscribers mostly have.
“Preferences are important!”
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And of course, the weekly proofreading and comments by my manager were the most helpful, making this internship a great learning experience. I tried to review every word choice recommendations that my manager made for me to improve my writing, but it wasn’t so easy to acquire and use a bubbly, attention-grabbing register. I would like to thank Bell for all the comments that made my blog (at least) worthy of publishing! 🙂
I applied for this internship because to me, the residential community at NUS is something that I am really thankful to – coming to a foreign country alone to study, the sole idea of having a great big group of people I live together is a relief and a blessing. And I feel even more thankful that I had the opportunity to contribute – albeit minimally – to the vibrant residential community we have here at NUS. After all, with all the love, fun, and care we have in all the halls and residences, we are, surely, “Better Together”! 🙂
“And the best part of it all has to be… slotting in random memes and comic strips in the blog posts!”
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