My first day was on Tuesday, January 12th. I am working completely remotely, which took some of the pressure off of commuting and meeting everyone in the office on Day 1. I was beyond excited to get started! The Chicago office welcomed me with open arms and I got a friendly hello from everyone. One perk of being remote is that I was also able to meet many co-workers from offices across the country. One of the most nerve-wracking moments of the week is when I had to call the CEO on my first day. I was very nervous about it but we ended up having a wonderful phone call and I am excited to have made that early connection.

Getting trained and up to speed had a bit of a slow start. My main supervisor and other co-workers assured me this was totally normal and things will kick up to full speed by the end of next week. Working in an agency has a bit of a different feel than a regular corporate workplace would. I am assigned to five different teams, each with a different team lead who is in charge of training me, assigning me tasks, and then monitoring those tasks. I was trained onto 2/5 of my different client teams and the other three will occur next week. I feel a bit stressed knowing I will have to keep track of so many tasks for completely different clients, but I know my soft skills of communication and organization will come in handy.

My first responsibilities included sitting on meets for my different teams and also researching the clients I would be working on. Both of these things gave me a ton of information for the work I will be doing going forward. By Thursday, I was able to start working on the two client accounts I was trained upon. I spent time looking at the media coverage the client accounts were receiving and then wrote coverage round-up reports. I received feedback and edited them after. This was really great practice already!

I still have a lot to learn and I am excited to get more comfortable and situated on each of the teams. I feel a lot of different emotions after this week including thankful, exhausted(!!!), anxious, and proud. I am very ready to continue my work at Praytell and have no doubt this will turn out to be a wonderful internship overall.