After months of planning, too many meetings, hundreds of emails and countless

obstacles, the organizers of the first annual Salisbury Bike Party gathered in Lot 1 in downtown

Salisbury, drenched in a slow but steady rain. It had been the brainchild of one man, a scientist at

Wallops Island, with a passion for cycling and a crazy idea that had been all but soiled by a little

H2O. This was the event I was employed to plan as the Southern Boys Concepts intern. This was

the greatest metaphor I had ever witnessed. When I arrived at the Evolution Craft Brewing Co.

barrel room in January, I had absolutely no idea what to expect. I was excited to be part of a great

brand and excited to learn everything there was to learn, and I was so unbelievably sure that

nothing could stop me from being the greatest intern that ever lived. But there was no way to

predict the weather. My internship experience was both challenging and rewarding, at times

frustrating but often inspiring. I learned to convey my ideas clearer and with more confidence,

how to streamline a meeting and how to make work when there is none. Most of all, I learned to

how to make the best of things especially a rainy day.

About three weeks before starting my internship with the events coordinator for Southern

Boys Concepts, I realized I wanted to be a journalist. Thats the problem when your major

combines both journalism and public relations youre free to switch between them as often and

with as much gusto as you want. As I was standing next to the hostess stand at Evo waiting for

my first meeting with Carol Morris, I was dreaming of NPR. After that meeting, I went home and

worked on my news producer reel. I was so convinced of this new career path, as if I hadnt

changed my mind a thousand times over the last four years. Regardless, I went into the meeting

with a positive attitude. I could see the line items on my resume as if theyd already been etched

in stone: planned a bike party for over 1,000 people, increased social media interactions by

300%... After all, isnt marketing just money-motivated storytelling? Doesnt great social media
begin with great copy? I was inspired by that first meeting with Carol because I knew Id be

great at whatever I did. I was confident that I was different from all the past interns, that Id

make a positive and lasting mark on the Southern Boys Concepts brand. My new aspirations did

not stop me from trying my hardest at this internship because that simply isnt the person I am.

There was so much I didnt know after that first meeting, the most thing being that in this

internship, I would find a career perfectly molded for a person just like me.

I think its becoming obvious that I didnt have a clue what my position would entail in

January. When I was looking for an internship I was also a full-time assistant manager and

barista at Rise Up Coffee. My general manager, Dana Fields, is well-connected on the eastern

shore and when I mentioned I was looking for an internship at a brewery (still thinking I wanted

to be a marketing mogul), she suggested I talk to Carol at Evolution Craft Brewing Co. I emailed

Carol, set up an interview, and after just one interview question, Carol took me around the office

and started introducing me as the Evo intern. Of course, I was through the roof that I had landed

an amazing internship with a company I loved (from afar), but I really wasnt sure the kinds of

projects Id be working on. After that first meeting, I quickly realized that Carol was a total jack-

of-all-trades. She planned events, posted on social media, designed flyers and menus and helped

around the office in any way needed. I loved that. I am the kind of person that needs to stay busy

to stay sane, so this type of job was perfect. I also really liked the fact that I could use all the

skills I have acquired through previous positions. Id be writing, doing social media, making

graphics and videos and event planning, all with the same job title. I had no idea that kind of job

even existed!

This new position led me to explore the field of the creative industry, something I had

barely even thought about before. Over the last four years, I have fallen in love and broken up
with so many career pathways. I wanted to be an event coordinator, a journalist, an author, a full-

time barista, a travel writer, a social media connoisseur, news producer, video editor, filmmaker,

scriptwriter, Spanish professor, English professor The list goes on and on. This was a position

that combined at least three of my potential futures. How was it possible? While I was interning

at SBC, I was also searching for a full-time, post-grad position. I applied to several journalism

jobs and internships, a teaching position in Santiago, Chile and a social media position at D3

Corp, a web solutions company based in Ocean City. I received little responses, some rejection

letters and just one positive, reply from D3. I met them at the job fair on campus, followed up the

next day and followed up again at the OC Trade Show in March. They loved my initiative and

my internship website and offered me a part-time paid position. I took it, excited about this new

industry that I was learning so much about. I didnt sign any papers with D3, but I was happy to

know I had something to do after graduation. Back at my current internship, I was still totally

immersed in learning the ropes, but growing frustrated at the communication that sometimes

was, and sometimes wasnt happening.

A degree in communication arts does not, and I repeat DOES NOT mean you are a good

communicator! If there is anything Ive learned in this major its that, but Ive also learned that

communication is paramount in any successful, growing business. Things were no different at

Southern Boys Concepts, but through observation I learned that the more hands you let into the

basket, the more important communication becomes. With 5 restaurants and a brewery on the

eastern shore alone, not to mention 4 other restaurants in Baltimore, Southern Boys has a whole

army of hands in that basket. Halfway through my internship, Sam Gibson, the Evo brand

manager, gave me the task of evaluating all our eastern shore social media accounts. He gave me

a report that Sysco did a year ago on our websites and social media, and I found that few things
had been corrected in a years time. I started working on a PowerPoint to highlight the things we

needed to fix, planning to show it to Carol and Todd (Carols boss) when it was finished. When I

brought the idea to Carol, she said a woman named Tanya from the Baltimore stores was already

doing that. I felt discouraged that all my hard work was for naught, that the five hours I had spent

going through and meticulously criticizing every Facebook, Twitter and Instagram account was

wasted. Communication is critical for managing social media for all these locations, and

Southern Boys was and is still lacking in that department. No one knows how many people have

access to the accounts, and if we want to increase the quantity and quality of our posts, we need

to get everyone on the same page. This could be 50 people, comprised of servers, general

managers and corporate. At the completion of my internship, I still do not feel that this issue was

resolved. Im not sure if theres an easy way to resolve it, but I hope that maybe Tanya from

Baltimore can find some sort of solution.

Although there were some frustrations with communication, I created some truly amazing

things of which I am truly proud. The first would be the first annual Salisbury Bike Party. After

sitting in on the first meeting in city hall, it really seemed that Evo was going to be involved in

the planning and execution of this city-wide event. It was ambitious, and it was being planned by

a guy that had no clue about event planning. In the end, it became a City of Salisbury event. The

only glimpse of Evo was the SoBos food truck in the parking lot of Headquarters Live. At times,

it felt like I was a downtown Salisbury intern. I worked closely with Jamie Heater and Chris

Demone to produce quality marketing content for the event, including a promotional video that I

wrote and helped direct. The video has since received over 1,000 views on Facebook and I got so

many compliments from friends and local community members. I appeared on TV, did some

interviews the day of the event and served as the overall media contact for the event. This was
particularly interesting for me, someone who has been on the other side for so long. Usually I

would be the journalist covering the event, but for the past three months Ive been the subject of

the event and Ive had an absolute blast. Im also proud of my initiative over the last three

months. I know Ive been griping a lot about the lack of work, but the fact of the matter is that

Carol didnt have all that much extra things for me to do. The entire semester was a game of

pass-the-intern, but for that reason I got to try so many things I wouldnt have done if I were

exclusively Carols intern. Im not the type of person to sit around and do nothing at work, so I

often had to find my own projects when there were none. There are so many examples of this.

When I saw the flowers in the SoBos exterior menu box were two seasons out-of-season, I

asked Carol if I could revamp it. I went to Hobby Lobby and picked out flowers that could easily

transition from spring to summer and arranged them in the window. When I was finished with

my projects for Carol, I went downstairs and asked the restaurant staff if they needed any help.

This led me to Micros, the tedious yet irreplaceable method for maintaining our popular loyalty

program. When patrons sign up, they fill out an info card by hand and the managers then must

enter every detail in by hand. They were very vocal about how much they hated it, and since I

really had nothing else to do I put on my headphones and did them for hours at a time. As an

intern, I never felt I was above any of the tasks I was given. My main goal was to help the office

run smoother in any way that I could, even if that included going to Staples to pick up toner or

going to the post office and the bank three times a day. Whenever I did these little tasks correctly,

I felt like I gained a little more of their trust for the bigger projects. My initiative also shone

when I bought a DSLR camera. It was a purchase I had been wanting to make for a very long

time, but one of Southern Boys weakest traits was their photography. I took it upon myself to

learn how to take good food photos. I am also very proud of the document I made for the SoBos
food truck. I had no experience in catering, but my organization and attention to detail were

obvious as I powered through this document. This helped us to secure many great events for the

summer, including some that the food truck has never been to. My proudest moment came just

after I met Sam Gibson, the brand manager at the time. He gave me tasks like monitoring social

media, fixing SEO and pointing out mistakes on our online store and website. These were things

I knew how to do, things at which I could truly succeed.. In late April I went through our

inventory and took a few new merch photos for the website. Just a few days later, I met Austin

Widdowson: the New Sam. He was impressed with all the work I had done and was super

bummed that I only had two more weeks left in my internship. He took me under his wing and

taught me how to take better pictures and make logos on Illustrator. Before Austin, I felt I was

doing great work but I hadnt gotten a whole lot of feedback. Austin made me feel like a rock

star, eventually offering me a job that paid much more than the position I took at D3. I told him

Id have to think about it. My experience at Evo hadnt been everything I imagined it had been,

but I was slowly starting to feel welcomed and appreciated with the work I was doing with

Austin. I am so proud of the collaboration we did for the new Primal logo and even more proud

of the one I designed on my own. I dont have a lot of experience with Illustrator and I am by no

standards an artist, but I think it turned out nicely. I am proud of so much of my own work, but

not everything went perfectly.

I disappointed myself so many times during this internship, and a few times I think I

disappointed my supervisors as well. It should not go without mentioning that while I was

working an average of 12 hours a week at Evo, I was working full-time at Rise Up Coffee, I was

the vice president of SUTV and I was taking two other classes. Maneuvering around my work

schedule was difficult, and I think if I was in the office more often the past three months I may
have felt like a bigger part of the team. I wish I would have had the confidence to cut down my

hours at Rise Up, but as an assistant manager I felt a duty to keep my 40 hours a week. I could

never abandon SUTV (Ive been a member since freshman year!), so that wasnt an option. So I

was stressed and I was overworked, and I disappointed myself in the ways I managed my time.

Some weeks I pay attention more to my schoolwork, other times to my internship, sometimes to

my personal relationships with friends and family and other times to Rise Up. That was the only

way I could figure to balance my time, but I think it affected the amount and quality of the work

I did at Evo. One of my biggest slip-ups happened at the end of the internship. I had finished all

the applications for the food trucks during the week of the Salisbury Bike Party. I was also

helping a friend plan another event and we were working on Salisbury Night Live at SU. I guess

I was rushing when I filled out the Berlin Jazz and Blues Bash application, because when the

food truck arrived there on May 6, the health department said they didnt have a permit. I

panicked and looked through my paperwork and found that to be true. I skipped over the

sentence that said you had to send a separate application to the Worcester County Health

Department. I was so disappointed in myself and Im sure I disappointed the team that drove the

truck all the way to Berlin just to pack up and leave. This couldve been avoided if I just took my

time and carefully reviewed the application before sending it. Of course, there were other factors

that contributed to this; the town of Berlin had our application on a desk somewhere and never

turned it in, we didnt follow up to make sure it was received, etc. At the end of the day, people

make mistakes, and this was my only major mistake in the last three months. It humbled me and

it inspired me to slow down, but these kinds of things come with the territory.

In the field of event planning, you cannot go into an event expecting it to be perfect. This

is an extremely human field, and accidents, miscommunication and other unanticipated factors
must be considered. As I said before, we spent months planning the Salisbury Bike Party. Every

detail was meticulously gone over hundreds of times, we had 20 volunteers, a dozen sponsors

and most of downtown Salisbury shut down for the day and it rained. The rain drastically

decreased the amount of people that came, it cut my volunteers in half and it made riding a bike a

lot more dangerous. No matter how much time we spent going over every detail, there was no

way of us knowing whether the weather would hold up, and it didnt. But when the event ended,

Jeremy and I were so happy. Everything worked out. There were a few kinks, sure, and it was

raining, sure, but we had successfully closed the streets in downtown Salisbury and all of Lot 1.

We spread the word (and fast!) through social media and local TV, and there was a buzz about it.

We got amazing pictures from a professional photographer and all we could say was next year

will be amazing. Sometimes thats all you can do, and I learned that very quickly. Im planning

on helping plan the next Salisbury Bike Party and some smaller biking events over the course of

the year because I had so much fun helping. I believe Jeremys event will only grow in the

coming years into something incredible.

I was expecting this internship to be fun, laidback and great for networking and it was all

those things and more. It transformed my future career goals, inspired me to pursue an interest in

photography and allowed me to play many different roles in the same company (and others). I

made things I will keep forever; logos, advertisements, press materials. It beefed up my resume

and it introduced me to amazing people I wouldnt normally get a chance to connect with. It

challenged me. I made mistakes and I resolved them, I learned how to do new things on my own.

It was something I will not soon forget, and I am seriously considering staying at this company.

Austin is such a positive influence, and there is so much left to do. Id be honored to have the

chance to help just a little more before I go. Moving forward, I know there will be many setbacks
and many achievements. We will probably always be taking three steps forward and two steps

back until we get somewhere, but Ive learned thats what this industry is about. I love its

unpredictability, its excitement, and Im excited to see where this crazy career might lead me.