I’ve finished my first real day!  It consisted of learning to write product press releases and then writing four or five of them.  Because the company I’m working for is so involved in their target industry, companies developing new products send them a ton of press releases.  We publish a certain number of these within the publications that go out to our members and on our website.

What this job actually looks like: I receive and e-mail from a company that wants us to advertise their product.  Their e-mail is basically like: we are the best company in the world, look at how great our product is!  My job is to take this information and turn it into a shorter and more informative piece of information for our company’s members.  Basically, I make the information more consumable.  So far I’ve just used Word to organize the information and Photoshop to edit the images they send us.  After I finish these two tasks, I upload the information using the company’s CMS.  It is a pretty straightforward process and I finished all of the releases I was given by the time I was ready to leave.

Though the process was pretty straightforward, and can be done fairly quickly, it was interesting to see how I brought what I’ve learned in the university with me.  At one point, I asked the fellow I was working with a series of questions (I wrote this that way in order to market to such-and-such audience), which seemed fairly intuitive and the guy I was working with seemed pretty satisfied.  He told me that what I’d written seemed accurate, and that he wouldn’t have even thought of those questions.  So while they were perhaps unnecessary for what I was doing, they were still on the mark.  I was happy with this response, because I felt like I was able to bring something extra to the process and utilize what I learned at the university (which is pretty important to me considering I’ve spent quite a while here now, and I’d like to think I’ve learned something useful).

Aside from the actual work I’ve done, I was able to talk to the other folks in my office a bit more.  There were only two others besides me, but I learned that one of them also holds an MA in English!  Apparently it is the degree to have if you’re doing this kind of work.  I had some great conversations with her, and in the end she gave me a ride home.  It looks like I have some pretty cool co-workers for the next 3 months or so