August 10th, 2017

The duration of our internship is six weeks. During those six weeks, we have two presentation days. Meaning, we have a lot of days that we are not presenting but are creating the campaign for those presentation days. So what goes on during those days? Well, I’m about to show you.

Save-A-Lot

We take our projects very seriously and our last campaign was no exception. We were told to come up with a campaign for Save-A-Lot, so we piled into Rachel’s minivan (aka “the bus”) to scout out the store. We felt a little strange as a group of six people walking into a grocery store, going down every aisle, and then not buying anything. So, Irina bought a jug of Aloe juice (which, believe it or not, contains pulp…) and grapes. Trips in the bus were never short of entertaining (and sometimes it was really hot when Rachel would forget to turn on the A/C for the folks in the very back); nevertheless, the bus always got us where we needed to go!

2.) Tasty Videos

One of our projects was to create a stop-motion video for Save-A-Lot and I can’t explain to you how much time this takes. We spent the whole day shooting these strawberries that were made to look like Santas. One wrong move had the potential to throw the entire video off. We almost had a major catastrophe. As Shelby was piping the icing onto one of the strawberries, the piping bag full of icing had a blowout, but it was caught in time and no Santas were harmed. We decided to purchase graham crackers at the store to dip them in the leftover icing. It was a group consensus that by doing this, we recreated the popular '90s snack, Dunkaroos. Needless to say, while we were hard at work filming we were also hard at work consuming all of the props.

3.) Improvisation

You want to say no? Too bad, because the #1 rule in improv is to always say yes (while doing improv). You want to keep the conversation flowing, and if you say no, the conversation stops. At HLK they started making all of the intern teams take an improv workshop lunch with Jason (Jason is an HLK employee who is very involved in the improv community). A few of us were nervous to do improv, but it didn’t take long for all of us to warm up and get comfortable with each other. It was a great way to let loose and learn to lean on each other for support. Between the laughing, the acting, and the eating our hour and a half improv session flew by.

These experiences have not only brought us closer as a team but also as friends. This internship has taught us many valuable lessons that we can apply throughout our future careers. But more importantly, this internship taught us how to work as a team in an agency. Luckily, I had a pretty stellar team.