Kendall Kazor : Finding My Niche–How my internship experience helped me discover my ideal career

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Kendall is a senior on the UGA Volleyball Team. She is currently majoring in Marketing and Personal & Organized Leadership with a minor in Studio Art.  Kendall had the opportunity to participate in an internship with IMG College’s Digital Marketing Team during the summer of 2017.

This past summer, I had the pleasure of working with IMG College’s Digital Marketing Team at UGA. As a marketing major with an emphasis in digital marketing and a minor in graphic design, it was an awesome experience to work in a digital creative environment such as IMG.

Working with IMG was the exact internship experience I was looking for this past summer. Training in the mornings and afternoons for volleyball and taking the academic credit hours necessary to be eligible to train, it was hard to find an internship in Athens willing to be flexible but also worth my time. IMG was the perfect fit, they were completely flexible with my schedule and my experience helped me narrow down what I want to do after I graduate.

Prior to my internship, I was on the fence of which field of marketing I wanted to pursue post-graduation: graphic, design, digital marketing strategy, sales, brand management etc. My internship consisted mostly of graphic design work. I designed and produced graphics for Georgiadogs.com to be launched this fall on their new web platform. At first, it was very challenging. I had no professional experience in design and did not know the programs very well other than what I had learned in class. I spent a lot of my time in and out of the office learning techniques in the Adobe design programs. I would sit down and watch countless YouTube tutorials on the Adobe Suite programs. It was at times frustrating. I would have these intricate and creative visions of what I wanted to create, but no expertise on how to create it. After a while and lots of practice, a design that would have taken me multiple hours to create at first, would take me less than 30 min, but I never fully reached the potential I envisioned. Through this experience, realized graphic design may not be the field for me.

It was a great learning experience. My creativity and efficiency in graphic design increased exponentially. That being said, I now know I do not want to pursue graphic design professionally. I found that I enjoy the strategic vision part of the process way more than the actual production. My time with IMG was a great opportunity and I am thankful for what I gleaned through this experience.

Now as I network and begin to pursue an internship next summer to set me up for my ideal career, I have a much better idea of the environment I can excel to reap the most. My natural affinity for concept organization and idea productivity that I found in the brainstorming process of design, has lead me to the conclusion that I want to pursue a career in a creative yet complex problem-solving environment such as consulting. A year ago, I would have never thought to pursue a career in consulting, but thanks to my internship I have discovered that consulting is the best environment for me to make an impact and grow my natural abilities. 

 

 

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Posted on

September 19, 2017

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