Dana Spataru, Bronxville High School Class of 2015, was pretty sure that her WISE project, an internship at a fashion magazine called TWELV, was going to give her valuable insight into a future career in communications and social media. It gave her insights a-plenty, but not necessarily the ones she expected.

 

 

A WISE Internship Turns into Something Else                                                             Dana started her internship thinking she would be helping out with social media accounts, but two weeks into doing just that, TWELV threw her a curve ball, asking her to help out with a new project. That project — a promotion for Craig’s Beds, creating a gummy bear mattress inspired by a gummy bear dress made years before at TWELV.  What did she have to do? Glue 10,000 multicolored gummy bears onto the mattress to prepare it for a photoshoot.  Well, not single-handedly. She did have others working with her. And not exclusively. She did have the opportunity to offer creative feedback on the mattress and was able to work on side projects, compiling guest lists for fashion parties and helping out with photoshoots and promotions. But Gummy Bears was the main action. Not exactly what she had anticipated.

When she started off at TWELV, an internship she was able to procure
thanks to her dad who used to work there, she told them of her interest in communications and social media. Sure enough, she worked a bit on this, a bit on that. She sent out out emails for fashion parties. She worked with the PR team on all aspects of the magazine’s business. She helped in promotions on the photographers working at the magazine. She learned how to set up rooms for photo shoots. She picked up clothing and dropped off clothing. Nothing too glamorous, perhaps, but all grist to the fashion magazine’s mill and all useful to someone who wanted to learn everything she could about communications.

Learning from Experience                                                                                                  So when her “job description” switched, and she found herself pasting gummy bear after gummy bear onto a mattress, she was initially startled, then disappointed, but in the end philosophical. If her intense communications-business learning had ended, learning about working in a professional environment had taken its place and Dana was quick to pick up on that. WISE, after all, so often provides its students with an immersion in the real world and this was, without doubt, immersion in the real world of business – tedious, at time, but also collegial and productive and, in the long run, necessary for the success of that business. The very tedious nature of it, she said, was productive in the end because it made her more patient.

The Quintessential WISE Learning                                                                                      It also taught her that fashion was not for her – and not just because of all those gummy bears! Dana learned another important WISE lesson: “You’ll never know one way or another if you’re interested in pursuing something until you try it. By working at a fashion magazine, I learned that I don’t want to go into fashion, and sometimes finding out what you don’t like is just as important as knowing what you do like.”

An Unexpected High Point                                                                                                   The highlights of WISE can be more than an internship, and this was true for Dana. For her the best part was, somewhat unexpectedly, her research paper. She had thought out, carefully what she wanted to do and chose a topic closely related to the social media work that she hoped to be doing at the magazine: the dangers of being female online, and the need to take extra steps to protect our privacy in digital interactions. When her job changed suddenly, she thought for a minute, but then decided to stick with her topic for her paper: “it was greatly relevant to my interests, and with what I learned from it I’ve been watching out for my friends and peers and helping them protect their privacy by encouraging them to do small things like covering their webcams and turning off geotagging in posts, which in the long run can make a big difference.” She had good reason to do so; she thought someone was tapping into both her phone and her computer, seeing whatever she was putting online. Having found the evidence of that, she was galvanized into action.

Major WISE Takeaways                                                                                                     She learned plenty from both that personal experience and the research that she had done. Two major takeaways:

• If you don’t take steps to protect your privacy, anything can happen to you.  One girl got blackmailed with pictures from webcams.

• Cover your webcams, use different usernames and passwords on different sites; don’t give out more information that you need to.

And like most WISE graduates she learned how to roll with the punches that real life throws at you and prevail despite them.

A Mentor’s Role                                                                                                               Dana was grateful for the support she received and especially for that given to her by her mentor, “my brilliant art teacher, who I’ve become very close to during my high school career. Because we share a bond, it was easy to talk to her about what I was doing, and she cared about making sure I stayed on track with the program. We would read through my journal entries together and talk about my research paper – not only its structure and argument, but we’d also have conversations pertaining to my research topic that were more social and less academic, which in turn enriched my writing and offered new insights into my work.”

Lessons for the Future                                                                                                        As for her future, WISE taught her, other than never wanting to see another gummy bear again – just kidding! – that, while fashion is something she will never understand, she does want to try her hand at social media. She is now a freshman at Baruch College in NYC and is considering majors in Social Media Managing, Communications and/or Art Administration. Her experience on TWELV’s PR team, however limited, gave her some valuable experience and that, in turn, reassured her that she does want to pursue something in that field. WISE worked for Dana, not because she had the ideal internship but because she learned volumes from every little piece of her project. Her advice to incoming WISE Students: “Be flexible. Your dream placement might not have availability or you might not find the perfect internship for you, and that’s okay. This isn’t the only opportunity you’ll have to explore your interests outside of school. Take a chance on something you’re not sure about, and make the most out of it.”

That’s exactly what Dana did, and she came out the WISE-er for it!