Hi Panthers! My name is Julia Trudeau, I am a junior Strategic and Corporate Communication major with a minor in Leadership studies. I’m Caroline Sarkani, a junior Communication Studies major with a minor in Public Relations. We worked together remotely during Interterm 2021 as Marketing Design Interns at George Washington University. During this term, we created three trifold brochures and three one-page fliers for GWU’s new online master’s programs in Cybersecurity Analytics, Cybersecurity Policy and Compliance, and Cloud Computing Management.

Both interested in marketing communication, we were determined to land an internship in the marketing field to continue building our portfolio. Having connections outside of your school or work is extremely influential. We reached out to a professor we knew at George Washington University and presented them our resumes and an elevator pitch. This landed us an interview with the chair of the Department of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering at GWU. His team was in the process of bringing in three new master’s programs to the School of Engineering and Applied Science and wanted marketing materials made.

Our internship consisted of researching and consolidating information to make our marketing materials as informative and concise as possible. We created many drafts in order to determine the best layout for the information, as well as which information was most necessary. This step was the most time-consuming because it was a priority to have clean space for designs and to make the pages appealing to read by prospective applicants.

Message Design II with Dr. LaBelle helped me (Julia) understand the importance of brand consistency, and how to create appealing media to a target audience. After working on the ReThink Campaign in SCC400, I learned to keep track of color, fonts, spacing, and sizing, and ensuring consistency across all media distributed to the audience. This was something I brought into my work at this internship. I determined which colors were to be used on all of our marketing materials that aligned with the colors on the GWU website. We also made sure the spacing of each section was consistent, and that all fonts and their sizes were identical on each brochure. While these may seem like minute details, they are extremely important to create a professional look.

Communication Theory (COM 314) with Dr. Eriko Maeda helped me (Caroline) be successful with my tasks during this internship. This course taught me about the communication process and what ideas shape how humans interpret language and communication. One of the major components in this internship was the language and writing style of the brochures and fliers. I applied the communication theories I learned in this course when writing persuasively and clearly to attract a broad demographic.

Our learning objectives were to develop concise marketing pieces such as brochures and flyers to advertise to and attract prospective applicants as well as learn how to identify the target population for our marketing pieces i.e. companies, other universities. This allowed us to take away new skills in Canva, become more detail-oriented, and strengthen our collaborative skills in a work environment. One of the most beneficial tasks we completed during this internship was identifying target audiences for the pieces we created. This tied together with the skills we learned in our School of Communication courses such as Research Methods, Theories of Persuasion, and Message Design because we applied them to a real-world marketing campaign.