By: Sammy Chmara
This week, we had the honor of welcoming 5 Communication professionals from a group of diverse organizations to join us for a highly interactive and informative panel. The experts gave us a little taste of what their professional journeys have entailed and how they got to where they are today. They also gave great advice and tips for landing a job or internship. Guests included Janelle Mazur; Digital Marketing Manager at Dogfish Head, Nicolette Kerr; Global Marketing Communications Specialist at Agilent Technologies, Christine McCann; Public Relations Account Executive at Aloysius Butler & Clark, Keri Papili; Marketing Specialist at Wilmington University, and Scott Day; Assistant Athletic Director of UD Athletics.
Christine McCann handles the PR and Social Media at Aloysius Butler & Clark where she is also in charge of their seasonal interns. McCann emphasized the importance of maintaining strong communication with all of her companies teams in order to ensure the best possible deliveries to her clients. She said figuring out the best way to communicate with all of her clients is also crucial, as everybody has different needs. McCann suggested that student interns interested in getting invited back to work in the future should be in a good place with all employees and make it known that they would love to come back. She also informed us of how important it is for interns to connect with everyone from your company on LinkedIn, even if they’re in another department.
Janelle Mazur said she landed a job at Dogfish from tweeting at them to see if they had any internship opportunities. Since then, she’s done customer service and now is creating paid and organic content for the brewery’s social media sites. She says that one of the most important elements of working for a food and beverage company is paying attention to customers and making sure that her projects best fit what they want to see.
Scott Day’s job with University of Delaware Athletics is fast paced, constantly on the go, and fun. He says his job handles a lot of different components; from coaches, to staff, to interviews, to marketing. He says from the media side, it’s important to remember who the target audience is. He also suggests that interns at any company are always willing to learn new tasks and take any opportunity that comes their way.
Keri Papili, UD PRSSA alumni member, talked about her experience prior to the higher education industry. She worked for Archer Group, where she did the social media for many well known companies like Wawa. She said she loved the collaborative culture she was exposed to in an agency environment. She said the most important part of her job was to look at competitor companies social media to see what they’re doing, and then try to work around that. She also talked about how important it is to network and stay in touch with professionals. Being in contact consistently is ideal, instead of just reaching out when in search of a job or internship.
Nicolette Kerr emphasized the importance of writing skills and how one needs to get their ideas across right of the bat. She is currently a global marketing communications specialist at Agilent Technologies in Wilmington. She said it’s important to get a sense of how your company writes and get any experience early on. She also explained how being an English major, she had little experience with science but still was able to succeed doing Marketing for a technology company.
Overall, all panel members were able to stress the importance of internship experience, continuous networking, and jumping for any opportunity you can get. We are so happy we got to hear from all of our panel members this week. We know that we were able to take away so much from this event!
prssaud.com 