During the second semester of my freshman year of college, I began to worry that I wouldn’t enjoy what I was going to school for once I graduated. I was just beginning on the path towards a Graphic Design degree and had newly added a minor in Marketing. I expressed these concerns to my mom, who shared the same concern for me and my future. Luckily, my mom’s foundation is a client of Nobox’s. I got in contact with Kim May, the owner, and immediately knew she was a person I wanted the opportunity to work with.
Over spring break I met with Kim in the downtown Amarillo Palace Coffee location, I was nervous, to say the least. I expected to end the meeting with Kim saying, “I’ll think on bringing you on as an intern and get back to you as soon as possible.” Instead, it basically started with, “Okay, what hours would you like to work, interns can do half days, full days or whatever you like.”
The best part of this internship is how open Kim and the rest of the office are to new people wanting to gain knowledge. They don’t expect you to know what you’re doing the second you step in the door and they don’t expect you to have vast previous knowledge when starting. No one was annoyed by the fact that I barely knew what I was doing most of the time and had to continuously ask questions. I’d only taken one marketing class before this internship, but they just wanted me to learn and grow. They wanted me to find out what I came to find out, does this career path fit me and can I see a future within it.
I nearly exclusively worked with social media, an area I know plenty about as a young adult. Seeing how much work goes into one single Facebook or Instagram post was eye-opening, some posts could be written in 30 seconds while others took upwards of an hour with a handful of revisions after. No one thinks about that when trying to think of a witty caption for their selfie or while mindlessly liking and scrolling past a business’ post.
My favorite part, though, was creating content for clients. I came up with a large number of possible ideas, some of which were actually used for social media posts during my time here and some are even being placed on schedules for future posts. Even if the ideas weren’t plausible or too far off to actually use, the content creators would give constructive criticism as to why and would sometimes help come up with a better idea along the same lines. Through this idea creating, Kim had the other intern, Madison, and I actually going to visit clients with her and other coworkers to take photos for future use. This gave us an opportunity to be creative away from a computer screen and bring our ideas to life.
We went and took pictures of tea, eyeglasses, sunglasses and so much more. We got to be models for client photos, interact with customers of clients and even interact with the clients directly sometimes. The whole internship was comparable to a class project, you have a due date, that is when you finish the internship, and you have to make it happen from start to finish in the time allotted. Start with generating ideas, finish with making some of those ideas reality.
With this internship, I feel so much more prepared for what lies ahead of me, although I do want to stick more to the graphic design side of the industry. This internship solidified the path I am on and sparked more of a fire within me to create and be creative. I couldn’t be more thankful for Kim and everyone else at Nobox for being so welcoming and for being so willing to teach me.
