h

e Good

Natalie Sogn, a senior economics major with a specialization in business, and Casey Goodmund, a recent SDSU graduate, interned at Lawrence and Schiller, a marketing agency based out of Sioux Falls. 

Goodmund interned at L&S as a design intern. She began her internship in May and is continuing her internship into the fall.

“I … worked on more client stuff than anything else … [L&S] wants you to learn and grow,” Goodmund said. “I’ve worked on a lot of Taco John’s, HuHot Mongolian Grill and South Dakota Scholarship fund.”

Sogn interned in the account service department. Her job was to talk to clients and bring all of the information and requests from the client to the rest of the team. 

“I would go and sit down with the client and say ‘what do you want, what’s your budget, how much media do you want to spend or buy and what’s the timeline for this’,” Sogn said. “It was very important that I would not miss anything because if you did it was pretty much all on you.”

When Sogn first started her internship, she was nervous because her major isn’t marketing, but she wanted the internship because she was interested in that area.

“I loved every aspect [of my internship], and that sounds really dumb,” Sogn said. “I think my favorite part was when I was actually able to lead a meeting. It felt that I was actually contributing … I was not just an intern just sitting back watching what’s happening.”

The Bad

Julia Bodnaruk gained an internship and some unwanted life experience this summer.

Bodnaruk worked as a hostess in her Chicago neighborhood with the promise that she would be able to use her graphic design knowledge to redesign the restaurant’s menus.

“I just needed experience, but I was doing the hostess role and it’s in the south side of Chicago and it’s not the best place to work,” Bodnaruk said. “I had a lot of rude people come into me as I was hostessing—they were very rude, yelling at me. I actually had a lady spit in my face because I didn’t get her order correct. It was awful; it was the worst job I’ve ever had.”

Later in the summer, the restaurant was missing $40 from the cash box and Bodnaruk was blamed; following that experience she quit the hostess role but continued working on her graphic design project. The project came to a halt when someone was murdered near the restaurant.

“It was just a bad place to work and so my advice for future people who are looking for an internship actually find an internship,” Bodnaruk said. “I wasted half of my summer.”

The Dream

Other students went into internships knowing that they eventually wanted to work in a job similar to their internship. For them, it would be the ideal, the dream, after college.

Becca Schultz, a senior human development and family studies major, completed an unpaid internship with the Minnehaha County and Human Services. She worked at Bishop Dudley Hospitality House, a homeless shelter in Sioux Falls, and Safe Home, “residency for chronically homeless suffering from alcohol dependency.”

“I definitely want to go into either counseling or social work type of stuff,” Schultz said, “and I want to focus on mental health I think.”

According to Schultz, as an HDFS major she was required to take a class that would prepare her for an internship and through this class she found a great internship. For her internship, she had to fill out daily logs, and a contract between her and her supervisor. She also was also required to smmarize every 80 hours and do a midterm and final evaluation with her supervisor. To conclude her internship, she wrote a paper about her interning experience.

“I was really kind of impressed with some of my people skills,” Schultz said. “ I was able to just sit back and listen. I also realized that I have a long ways [to go], I have a lot of experience yet to gain.”