Intern Profile: Rachel Berman

We decided it might be interesting to go to the source and actually profile real human interns to give you an idea of what your colleagues are up to this summer. So one week after we commemorated the birth of our nation, we give birth to our Intern Profile series.

Our first intern is Intern Rachel, a 22-year-old Nor Cal native who graduated from Lander College in May with a degree in English and Communications. She is currently a summer intern at Zeno Group, a PR firm with a New York branch located near Union Square Park. This is the life of Rachel Berman. You think you know, and maybe you do...but maybe, you have no idea.

Rachel: In a massive PR firm, so I'm told, I'd be faxing, filing, and smiling at all the big-heads and hoping for a real assignment. At Zeno Group, a small but exclusive little company, I'm lucky enough to get to pitch. And pitch. And...

Thursday morning finds me frantically following up with every hick newspaper in Brooklyn, trying to get them to print our client's press release while using my brightest voice that hints not to the boredom-inducing contents. If the reporters don't hang up on me, and if I'm pretty awake, I push them to set up an interview with our client, one that "I'd be happy to coordinate, smile smile," and which will give us more ink, more coverage, and make the good ol' client happy. Luckily, an entire dozen Brooklyn newspapers are owned by one friendly editor who takes my release and puts it out in all of them, giving me a nice bunch of clips to show my boss. It even goes online and gets caught up in a Google alert. Nearly half of an intern's job is scouring Google alerts...but anyway. At least I didn't end up like my fellow intern Sophia who contacted a tiny newspaper in Harlem, was blessed for her efforts, and was told to go find G-d.

Other daily duties at Zeno include research unlike anything I ever did in school, like finding a working phone number for a newspaper in Florida that doesn't have a website, or calculating how many op-eds the NY Times and Wall Street Journal ran on Global Business Strategy in the last six months. Or I'm taking my lunch break in Union Square Park and picking up some Farmer's Market apples and admiring street artists who are selling some of the funkiest photography in existence.

Life is always cool in Manhattan.

My word of advice to all PR interns would be (with my vast one month of experience) to always act with extreme, extreme confidence. Whether you're pitching a reporter or silently taking notes in a meeting, be calmly confident and trust yourself and others will respond to that by giving you more projects (your boss) or by running your story (the press).

And most importantly, take every little thing seriously. It might not seem that crucial to edit a project tracker so that it's completely exact, or spend an hour formatting a document just so it reads clearer, but believe me, it matters. And not only to make your boss happy. Things take time to organize and compile, and it's good to put in that time. It's all just part of the working world.

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