We have just a little over a week left at our media internships, and it amazes me how fast the time has gone by! I’ve heard so many interesting stories from all the other students on this trip about some of the experiences they have had so far, and I think it is safe to say that we have all learned so much about the culture and ourselves from these experiences.

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I am very grateful for the internship I was placed in. I work pretty close to home in a beautiful building that looks over the airport and I am lucky to have another student from the trip, Sam, interning at the same agency as me.

I have spent the last four weeks at Emerge Advertising Ltd., which was founded by my supervisor, Michelle, around twenty years ago. Michelle is such in inspirational woman. She always tells us that we can do anything we put our minds to, so long as we never give up.

I have enjoyed my internship experience so far, but I have noticed one very large difference between the way Emerge Advertising works compared to the way an American advertising agency works. The main difference I have noticed is that nobody really specializes in one thing here. I am working on specializing in strategy at the University of Oregon, but here everyone seems to do everything. It’s almost like whoever is not doing something will work on whatever else still needs to be done rather than focusing on one particular area within a given project.

I was hoping to learn more about the strategy process while interning here, but I have mostly been working on television advertisements, radio advertisements, market entry strategies, some art direction, and a few other random things here and there. I feel like I have learned a lot, but nothing really about what I want to specialize in.

Even though I was looking forward to learning more about strategy, I think that it is important to have some knowledge within every specialization of advertising as it makes understanding the overall process a little easier. Even if it wasn’t exactly what I expected in the first place, I think my experience here has been worthwhile so far.