Victoria Drake
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My Internship Year at Viacom* Victoria was employed by Viacom upon graduation! *
My name is Victoria Drake and this year I had 2 internships at Viacom. For those of you who don’t know, Viacom is a large group of television stations that owns networks you are probably familiar with such as MTV, Vh1, Comedy Central, as well as Paramount. In the fall I was interning at MTV research, and in the spring I was in corporate consumer research
Going in to Dr. Hatchard’s field experience course I initially planned to get an internship with a guidance counselor, since I was in the 5yr program for school counseling, however while reviewing her list of internship sources, I came across MTV and applied online to the program. After getting called back for a phone interview and learning about the different departments I could intern for, I decided to take a chance and try consumer research at MTV.
My daily tasks included creating surveys for show premieres, midseason, and finales and for different celebrities or characters, interpreting data from those surveys and performing social media searches to give a voice to the statistics and putting this together into presentations for my supervisor. I also helped out with a comedy show that was designed to find what our generation thinks is funny. For this I went to meetings to discuss currently successful comedy shows and what they did well, did social media/news searches to see what people were saying about various programs. This led to the development of new live-comedy show, Nikki & Sara, which was designed to make fun of celebrity news and current events
My big project was on award shows, because MTV was looking to improve ratings for their movie awards. I read news articles and people’s tweets/fb posts, and reviewed Neilson data to see what people did and didn’t like about various award shows. I also got to help pick the host for the show, which was Rebel Wilson as you know if you watched the show a couple weeks ago. The analysts compile a list of “upcoming“ celebrities who are generating a lot of buzz and survey participants to see what they thought of those individuals. They would be like, “find me five female and five male celebrities like Rebel Wilson, or James Franco” so I would do that for surveys, and the great survey responses they got for Rebel Wilson made her the choice for the host. Since the show aired 2 weeks ago, it was really exciting and rewarding to see the changes that I helped make and see Rebel Wilson get great reviews as the host because I did a lot of the research to make that happen.
My corporate internship was a little different, my work was less fun/creative than at MTV but I had more real responsibilities. I summarized reports that were sent out to the department. I helped create their new studies by researching existing data on various databases that they use. I also updated and maintained a company-wide calendar of industry events that showed different seminars/conferences employees could attend for professional development. By the end of my internship I was writing up entire sections for the reports, it was really cool to see my role develop and to keep getting more and more responsibilities.
There were definitely some cool benefits to interning at Viacom. I attended lots of meetings to brainstorm/share ideas, heard some interesting speakers, and worked with important people. I also got to see some show tapings. They give interns tickets to live tapings of Daily show & Colbert so I got to go a taping of the Colbert Report. During my recent internship I ran into my supervisor from MTV, who invited me to the taping of an episode of Nikki & Sara since I had worked on their comedy study and helped with research that created this show, so again it was really exciting to see how some of my research came to life. And of course a major aspect of working at MTV is seeing celebrities. Even though I did see too many in the research department, interns were constantly gossiping about the different celebrities they saw in the building such as Nick Cannon or Taylor Swift. I did however see Snoop Dogg, and Sway from MTV news in the cafeteria a couple times, so that was exciting!
There is no question that having a research background gave me an advantage in landing this internship. Thesis gave me a unique experience to talk about in my interview, which I really think impressed my supervisors. It also and gave me insight into how they create and execute studies. Also just the terms we learn in research methods and statistics- I would have been very lost at times if I didn’t know what a t-test or p-value was, or what significance had to be.
Being a psychology major has also made me comfortable working with data and statistics, and having to explain findings in a user friendly way. At companies like Viacom they are really big on being able to interpret data in a way that “tells a story” to prospective clients, show producers, and sales people. As a psychology major this is a skill that we acquire whether its writing a research paper or presenting in stats/experimental, or designing our own thesis
I had a unique intern experience, I went outside comfort zone to work in Times Square for a giant corporation. I also learned about an entirely new field—I did not realize how much research is used as the foundation for pretty much every big company, and I never thought that as a psychology major I could be applying my knowledge at a place like MTV. In terms of professional development, I learned how to network and I built professional relationships, still keep in contact with my supervisors, and these might be important references or connections in the future.
Now employers want students to have at least 2 internships and I was able to do both in one year so those of you that still need more internships definitely still have time. I also got my foot in the door, this has helped me when applying and interviewing for some full time positions at Viacom. Even if I don’t end up working at Viacom in the future, I have a strong internship background that will hopefully one day help me land my dream job and I feel very lucky to have had this experience!
My name is Victoria Drake and this year I had 2 internships at Viacom. For those of you who don’t know, Viacom is a large group of television stations that owns networks you are probably familiar with such as MTV, Vh1, Comedy Central, as well as Paramount. In the fall I was interning at MTV research, and in the spring I was in corporate consumer research
Going in to Dr. Hatchard’s field experience course I initially planned to get an internship with a guidance counselor, since I was in the 5yr program for school counseling, however while reviewing her list of internship sources, I came across MTV and applied online to the program. After getting called back for a phone interview and learning about the different departments I could intern for, I decided to take a chance and try consumer research at MTV.
My daily tasks included creating surveys for show premieres, midseason, and finales and for different celebrities or characters, interpreting data from those surveys and performing social media searches to give a voice to the statistics and putting this together into presentations for my supervisor. I also helped out with a comedy show that was designed to find what our generation thinks is funny. For this I went to meetings to discuss currently successful comedy shows and what they did well, did social media/news searches to see what people were saying about various programs. This led to the development of new live-comedy show, Nikki & Sara, which was designed to make fun of celebrity news and current events
My big project was on award shows, because MTV was looking to improve ratings for their movie awards. I read news articles and people’s tweets/fb posts, and reviewed Neilson data to see what people did and didn’t like about various award shows. I also got to help pick the host for the show, which was Rebel Wilson as you know if you watched the show a couple weeks ago. The analysts compile a list of “upcoming“ celebrities who are generating a lot of buzz and survey participants to see what they thought of those individuals. They would be like, “find me five female and five male celebrities like Rebel Wilson, or James Franco” so I would do that for surveys, and the great survey responses they got for Rebel Wilson made her the choice for the host. Since the show aired 2 weeks ago, it was really exciting and rewarding to see the changes that I helped make and see Rebel Wilson get great reviews as the host because I did a lot of the research to make that happen.
My corporate internship was a little different, my work was less fun/creative than at MTV but I had more real responsibilities. I summarized reports that were sent out to the department. I helped create their new studies by researching existing data on various databases that they use. I also updated and maintained a company-wide calendar of industry events that showed different seminars/conferences employees could attend for professional development. By the end of my internship I was writing up entire sections for the reports, it was really cool to see my role develop and to keep getting more and more responsibilities.
There were definitely some cool benefits to interning at Viacom. I attended lots of meetings to brainstorm/share ideas, heard some interesting speakers, and worked with important people. I also got to see some show tapings. They give interns tickets to live tapings of Daily show & Colbert so I got to go a taping of the Colbert Report. During my recent internship I ran into my supervisor from MTV, who invited me to the taping of an episode of Nikki & Sara since I had worked on their comedy study and helped with research that created this show, so again it was really exciting to see how some of my research came to life. And of course a major aspect of working at MTV is seeing celebrities. Even though I did see too many in the research department, interns were constantly gossiping about the different celebrities they saw in the building such as Nick Cannon or Taylor Swift. I did however see Snoop Dogg, and Sway from MTV news in the cafeteria a couple times, so that was exciting!
There is no question that having a research background gave me an advantage in landing this internship. Thesis gave me a unique experience to talk about in my interview, which I really think impressed my supervisors. It also and gave me insight into how they create and execute studies. Also just the terms we learn in research methods and statistics- I would have been very lost at times if I didn’t know what a t-test or p-value was, or what significance had to be.
Being a psychology major has also made me comfortable working with data and statistics, and having to explain findings in a user friendly way. At companies like Viacom they are really big on being able to interpret data in a way that “tells a story” to prospective clients, show producers, and sales people. As a psychology major this is a skill that we acquire whether its writing a research paper or presenting in stats/experimental, or designing our own thesis
I had a unique intern experience, I went outside comfort zone to work in Times Square for a giant corporation. I also learned about an entirely new field—I did not realize how much research is used as the foundation for pretty much every big company, and I never thought that as a psychology major I could be applying my knowledge at a place like MTV. In terms of professional development, I learned how to network and I built professional relationships, still keep in contact with my supervisors, and these might be important references or connections in the future.
Now employers want students to have at least 2 internships and I was able to do both in one year so those of you that still need more internships definitely still have time. I also got my foot in the door, this has helped me when applying and interviewing for some full time positions at Viacom. Even if I don’t end up working at Viacom in the future, I have a strong internship background that will hopefully one day help me land my dream job and I feel very lucky to have had this experience!