Last Day on the Job

Today is my last day interning with Stage of Life, and it’s pretty upsetting. I enjoyed my time here and the casual relationship I have with my boss. While I’ll enjoy being able to sleep in, I’ll certainly miss the work and the experience.

Since today is my last day, Eric didn’t give me much heavy work. I read through contest entries and was playing around on Pinterest, a pretty relaxed day full of great conversations. 

Leaving will be sad, but I’ll definitely leave with great experience and memories from my time at Stage of Life. 

Extra! Extra! Read all about it!

So any of you who follow, or are members of, Stage of Life, know that our contest this month is “What’s in the news?” and it’s turned up some pretty interesting results. For one, yet another press release has been put out about how awesome we are, and the link to this great thing is here. Even cooler than that, I got to take this press release and find teen journalists that might be interested in submitting an entry to the contest. This contest is right up any journalist’s alley, and its a great journalism exercise because entries are 500 words or less, which is the size of your typical news article.

However, finding teen journalists is harder than it seems. I found a few different associations, organizations, and news papers that I reached out to. Its possible that I could have found more, but once you go far back enough into Google and find “teen journalist porn” you know it’s time to quit. 

Other than that, I blogged a little something for Stage of Life in the “home owner” section because this girl signed her lease for her house next year! Yay me! 

Videos

I swear I have the best internship ever, because I spent like 60% of my day watching youtube videos for Stage of Life. I’ll give you a minute to be jealous.

There wasn’t much for me to do, but then I found a video from the Dove Real Beauty campaign where Dove hired a forensic artist to draw the image that women had of themselves, then he drew an image of how other people saw them. The two images were revealed to the women, and it had a pretty big impact on them. The way women saw themselves was almost always worse than how others saw them. What does that say about our society?

I brought this up to Eric and he told me to send him the link, and then had a good idea for a project for me. He asked me to find a video for each stage of life, which is actually harder than it sounds–especially when you type in  “your first baby” looking for tips for how to handle your first child and you run into child birth videos. Great times.

But I did finish the list, and gave it to Eric, and he’s giving it to another intern to put them on the website. Some of them are really helpful, other are really funny, but when they go up I’ll give you guys the link so you can see what I found. 🙂 

Exciting Day!

So not only is today an absolutely GORGEOUS day, but I had great news today! A news station in New York, Channel One, is running a story on the gun debate and found our national writing contest and teen trend report, and they reached out to us to see if they could contact some of our teenage bloggers that wrote about gun rights. What an amazing chance!

So I went through all of the contest entries pertaining to gun rights and contacted each blogger with the good news. It took a while to find all of the different posts that were in favor of gun rights, but I did it!

Other than that, I didn’t do much else today other than work on our pinterest.

Pajama Day

Working from home is great because I get to work in my pajamas until I feel like being a real person and putting on real person clothes (which happened approximately around noon). I swear, there’s nothing more satisfying than doing work while eating a grilled cheese sandwich and chillin’ in pjs. Well, it’d be more satisfying if I was getting paid to work in my pajamas, but it is what it is.

Aside from having an incredibly relaxing work day, I blogged on Stage of Life in the Parent’s section about just how great home cooking is, and two recipes that I think of when someone says “home cooking.” These recipes are chicken pot pie and unstuffed stuffed cabbage, dinner staples in my household. If you’re interested in reading my post, you can find it here!

If you’re not interested in checking out my post, you can check out our pinterest because I was working on that today as well. 

In other news, hopefully my Top Ten Education Blogs list gets up soon! That would be great to see, and for everyone else to take a look at. 

Top Ten

So today I finished up my pr project. I had been dutifully working on a list of “Top 10 Educational Blogs” which actually took me a long time because I had to go through all the blogs I had contacted, then figure out some order for them, and then write out some little blurb for them so people knew what the blog was about. And what happened? I lost it all.

I don’t even know how it happened. I tried to hit enter so I had more space at the top and suddenly everything was gone. I didn’t panic though, I could always hit “undo.” But undo didn’t work. I hit the button a million times and nothing brought back the list I had worked on for hours. So I had to go back and do it all over again. Except I didn’t want to. I ended up redoing the list, but I didn’t put in the little blurbs because I didn’t want to have to do them again. Instead, I wrote a blurb about the list as a whole and hoped that would be enough. Was it? Well, I gave the list to my boss and he asked me for little blurbs on every blog. Crying inside, I went back to my desk and redid my work.

Other than that, I wrote a blog post for the Grandparents section of Stage of Life about my grandfather’s decision to sell the boat that has been in the family for decades. 

More Pr

Today I continued my work trying to get Stage of Life and everything it can offer to education bloggers and sites, and educators. It’s a slow process, not everyone has contact information on their blog and not everyone has a good blog. But, I added about ten new contacts to my list, and they all got a lovely little email about the benefits of Stage of Life.

There truly is a wealth of education blogs out there. It’s just a matter of finding the right ones, and finding the right ones with contact information available.

Thursday’s Post: PR Project

So, on Thursday, I had an interesting project from Eric. He had asked me to find bloggers who were educators, or education focused, and contact them with some basic information about Stage of Life to get them interested and hopefully signal boost us or something.

Finding quality education blogs is a little difficult though, or even education blogs that cater to the high school or older crowd because that’s what Stage of Life appeals to. Luckily enough, I found several lists of “Top Education Blogs” and got a lot of contacts that way. Once my lists is complete, and I’m done with the project, I’ll post my list of my Top Education Blogs and after that you should see that information go up in the stage of life website.

🙂

Emails Everywhere!

Today I cleaned up my emails and wrote a few more. I think I got the hang of writing emails for Stage of Life. Finding inspiration for a weekly email to Stage of Life members was a little difficult, but then I found a gem of a resource. I found a website with national/international holidays for the entire year. It’s broken up into the different months, and almost each day has a holiday. This is so great because when I was stuck for a blogging idea, I threw in one of the holidays (World Anti-Terrorism Day, International Health Day, Women’s Health Day) and asked them to think about it and maybe blog about it. I tried to pick holidays that had more significance (considering that some were lucky penny day or blueberry cheesecake day) because I wanted to give something to the Stage of Life bloggers that fit in with what we’re trying to do. My boss loved the idea, so hopefully he loves my emails!

Rainy Tuesday

Getting to the office was a bit of a struggle today because of the rain. I swear people forget how to drive the second the asphalt gets wet. 

But once I got to work, I had the pleasure of working on emails for Stage of Life. Eric currently sends out about one email a month, and he wants to bump it up to once a week. So far today I’ve made it through the March, April, and the first few May emails. So soon, you guys will be able to see my emails! (Assuming you’re a member of Stage of Life, that is)

It was a little difficult to think of new things to write for every email, but I figured it out and made it work. The only thing that Eric might get me on is that for a few of my emails, they might seem too sales man-y, like, too much of an advertising tone. But we’ll see.