What They Don’t Teach You In School

I often get hung up on what I am learning as a communications major/business minor in college and what I gain from interning at a marketing firm. I realize that in some cases experience is better than others, but honestly I wish my education in the classroom more than just scratched the surface with advertising. In class I often learned about the basics of topics like demographics, ethics, theories, behaviors, writing, and very basic Photoshop skills. I sometimes get frustrated because, in class I wish we went more in depth on topics and analyzed exactly how different types of medium and vehicles work in today’s market.

As an intern sometimes I feel like I am getting my lunch eaten because I don’t know how to do things or how something operates on a program or at the tech level. I often have to teach myself and just fight through it. Here at Yovia we often work on the internet and therefore use computers all day long even for our end results in advertisement. What frustrates me about this is that in school everything has to be tangent and in paper or on a poster. I mean yes I’ve made a video and done a couple radio spot for class but we never learned the brute skills of actually doing it. If we had an idea we would just make a poor version of our thoughts with out hardly any direction or help on setting it up. For example if we made a T.V. commercial we would make a three by three picture display of what would happen if it was an ad. In some ways I think this is good because we are being creative, but we are missing out on how the actual process works and how we can tweak the idea to make it better. We are missing out on working side by side with someone to share ideas and develop them into something even better using technology.

I understand that my internship might be a bit more involved with computers and the web, but I wish my school scratched the surface a little bit more in relationship with how advertisers use the web and different mediums to maximize their impact on their target audiences. There is a lot to learn about advertising especially within the internet.

By: Matt Hite
Intern
Yovia.com