Through the course of this internship, I have learned a lot about the giving societies that donors can fall into here at Longwood. Depending on how much money you give, you are placed in different giving societies, such as the Citizen Leadership Society, or the 1839 Giving Society. The more money someone gives, the more prestegious and exclusive the giving society is. I have also been meeting more people in the office and recently met Nicole Perkins, who is the Director of Alumni Engagement. She describes her job as essentially an event planner on a very large scale. She showed me how she plans out her events and her planning binders in detail. This has heightened my interest in event planning because I now have networked with someone in the field and have gotten a chance to take an insiders look at all the planning that goes into events. We discussed the Mega Reunion, which is coming up on May 11th, and all of the planning, descions and time that have gone into it so far.

Some challenges that I have faced so far are that my supervisor did not like the initial Thank You video that another intern and I shot to send to donors. We did not clearly understand her vision for the video, so we shot what we thought would be nice to receive. We also have not had a chance to put all of our videos together yet. They are still individual short shots that we were hoping to combine into one video. We have not gotten access to the software program that our supervisor wants us to use to put the videos together, so we are somewhat stuck in a rut until we get access.

I think that both the negative a positive experiences are going to have a big impact in my future career. Connecting with Nicole Perkins will impact my career greatly because she is in a position that I have considered for my future career. This will allow me to explore that option to determine if it is a path that I would like to follow or not. The negative experiences, such as not creating a video that my supervisor wanted me to, is also going to impact my future career. It will motivate me to learn what my client truly wants so that I can attempt to get it right on the first try. I have also learned how to be patient and keep myself busy as I await for access to ThankView, the software that I am to use to put together the Thank You video.