This past week I have been working as an intern for Nuffer, Smith, Tucker, doing a wide range of different tasks, from going through old birthday coupons to writing a press release. And I think I can confidently say that it was one of the most enlightening (and busy) weeks of my life. Most other 15-year-olds would scoff at the idea of spending a week of their summer working. I, however, must be one of a handful that would leap at such a wonderful opportunity. If anything, I came out of the office on my last day surprised at just how much I learned in such a short period of time.
On my first day here at NST, I was sat down at my desk and given a stack of about 1,000 old birthday coupons and instructions on how to go through and organize them. For about five minutes, I was worried this is how my entire week would be – doing file clerk work. Then, within the hour, I had three different projects on my desk that were, fortunately for me, the opposite of filing away cards. Each project (a PowerPoint, learning how to use the Adobe software, and a writing assignment, repsectively) lent itself to different areas of my creative consciousness.
On Wednesday, I toured the Neyenesch Printing Plant, and got to witness the production of several different pamphlets, posters, and magazines. The digitized printing presses were very impressive, and gave creedence to Neyenesch’s great reputatation. Thursday provided a very interesting experience, when my uncle, and the president of NST, Bill, took me with him to a Rotary International meeting, where I got the opportunity to meet several very nice people and listen in on a very well-structured organization. Plus, the food they served at the meeting was quite delicious. On Friday, my last day, I got to see the NST web team in action, and got to learn the basics of HTML coding, which was much simpler than what I had expected. However, once you move beyond the basics (which I tried, and failed to do), it starts getting into the territory where you have to be quite well-versed in the area of coding to even be able to comprehend.
After spending a week with them, I can now see how well put-together Nuffer, Smith, Tucker is, and how hard all the people there work. It seems like all of them are pretty close with one another, which really helps in a workplace that’s dependent on proper communication. Overall, the experience really taught me a lot about businesses and how they work, and I would be more than happy to do it all over again sometime in the future.
