By: Sam Lorenzo

Internships are in full swing here in Ghana and I’m so happy to have been placed at the Alliance for Reproductive Health Rights (ARHR). This summer, I will be spending four weeks devising a communications plan for the company as well as creating digital content to help boost awareness and online engagement for their various health education initiatives.

Two weeks before arriving in Ghana, my internship supervisors, Doris and Isaac, scheduled a virtual meeting with me to go over expectations for the summer. Their requests were very straightforward: cultivate new strategies for the communications team, help increase online engagement, assist with visual content creation, and teach the team how to monitor and measure their efforts. Thanks to both my academic and professional experiences in communication and social media coordination, I was eager to get to work.

There was, however, one element that stuck with me throughout this initial meeting: I was given free rein to decide what my workload and in-office schedule would be. I am absolutely thrilled to have complete creative freedom over my work and a flexible schedule, but at the same time, after spending years working in the corporate world, this structure is somewhat foreign to me.

I’m used to pitching ideas for approval to executives and supervisors, but now I’m going to be skipping that step entirely and going directly to execution. I’m interested to see how this all goes…