Hi fellow School of Communication students! My name is Ruby Trestik and I am a rising junior majoring in strategic and corporate communication with a minor in entrepreneurship! This summer I had the privilege of interning for Kitchen Table PR and Marketing, a boutique marketing and PR firm located here in Southern California! The CEO of the company is someone who I have known for a while, so I was able to get this internship through my own networking. The cover image is a BTS shot I took of her in action, filming a social media series for one of our clients!

KTM is a remote business at the moment, with no physical office space. I was given assignments weekly that included social media content creation, tracking coverage for press releases, writing press releases, staffing and running events for clients, writing press releases and event advertisements, creating coverage reports for clients and any other odd jobs that needed to be done. I worked from home so it was up to me to manage my time to make sure that I could get all of my assignments done before their due dates. This was a big learning curve for me, and challenged me to work on perfecting my time management skills!

Having recently taken SCC 100, I felt that a lot of the things I had learned in that class stuck with me and I utilized them during my internship. One of the things I used the most was my knowledge about target audiences. When writing and creating content I was constantly having to think about what audience my material was for and how I could best cater the messaging for them.

My favorite part about the internship was when I was able to be on-site for filming or events. We work with live TV very often and it was so interesting to see the process of filming for daytime news channels! It was very different than I had ever expected. The photo here shows the behind the scenes of a segment we filmed at KTLA for National Sandwich Month!

Behind the scenes KTLA

Throughout the internship process, my supervisor and I both learned that I was very skilled at social media content creation. This was a skill I was not aware of before and since finding out about I have learned that it is something I really love to do! My assignments started to become mainly content creation, and I was able to grow the social media presence of two of our clients as well as the agency exponentially! I was really proud of myself for this, and also discovered a potential career path I may want to pursue!

If you are interested in working in PR, advertising, or marketing I would highly recommend interning for a firm like KTM. You are exposed to all different aspects of the field which gives you the opportunity to figure out what parts make you excited, and what you can do without. I learned that I really love content creation and the event planning process, while I am not so crazy about the writing and media relations side. KTM has the most amazing work-place enviornment, and I feel like I am walking away from this experience with not only newfound knowledge but also three amazing women mentors!