Ethnic Conflicts and Political Violence Paper and Questions

Ethan Ruby

CDCI 395-03

August 1ST, 2015

Professor Courtney E. Ignarri  

Journal Entry #5

        These past two weeks have been my first during the summer where I have not been working as an intern at Ruby Media Group. There are certain aspects I miss such as getting to attend a professional workplace and the structure of waking up by 9:00am each morning. Looking back at the whole experience I am able to see some more of the positives than just simply negatives as I used to during reflection. I believe I am fully prepared to write my research paper for this class on the topic of the necessity of the public relations field and how big of a part social media is in it. I have made sure that my departure from Ruby Media Group is a cordial one and I think my boss understands why exactly I chose to quite after my school hours were completed. To a certain extent I think that it is good thing that my boss was not perfect at managing her team of interns, and did not give me easier treatment as a family member. I received more of a realistic experience of what it is like to be frustrated working in a low level position and how where my own discretion lies on whether or not to continue on at a job. The takeaway for me is that I got to learn how to communicate with co workers effectively, create power points for the sake of presentation, draft sales pitches both for email and phone calls, and have first hand experience watching a CEO use everything at her disposal to retain and acquire clients. Hopefully I can turn these into marketable, transferable skills that will further serve me in my career’s pursuits. Leaving on polite terms with my boss will also help me in that futuristic sense too because, being a public relations expert herself, she incentivizes her employees by telling them she will craft an attractive way to write about Ruby Media Group and the skills we learned for our resumes. I will make sure to include this in my final journal entry. With respect to the book InternQube by Michael True I think there is definitely a lot of useful information and tricks included considering how impossible it is to write a manual that could be applied to any internship position. Many of the major points included in the book are actually things that I studied during my time as a marketing major at Tulane University’s business school for a year and a half. The chapter that I found most useful and relevant to my job was the one entitled “Email Etiquette”. From the second I showed up at work to my end of day report emailing was by far the most used form of communication. Whether I was talking to someone else in the staff I had to be able to convey exactly what I was working on and what I had accomplished concisely. There was a stringent format to the emails written from my work email so that the important information was conveyed and no time was wasted. Tips in the book like paying close attention to grammar, spacing out topics, and never using CAPS LOCK where guidelines I followed for sure. There was not much in the book yet that I have read worth mentioning that I strongly disagree with.