In the spring of my senior year of high school while visiting Princeton University, the college I would attend in the fall, I received some exciting news. I had been chosen to be apart of the prestigious Emma L. Bowen Foundation. As an Emma Bowen Scholar, I would be partnered with a media company for four summers and intern within several departments during my tenure with the company. Not only was I excited to be apart of such a great program, but I was even more thrilled when I found out who my partner company was! I remember anxiously awaiting my first day of work. I never expected that during my next four summers with CBS, so many doors would open up for me in ways I could never imagine.
During my first summer at CBS, I worked for CBS’ Workforce Development. My intern project for the summer was to analyze and research CBS’s corporate website versus competitors’ career and diversity websites. My main task was to compare approaches to targeting and recruiting applicants. The summer culminated with a presentation in which I, along with another intern, presented the findings to our SVP. That first summer at CBS I learned so many new skills such as making professional excel spreadsheets, preparing executive-level presentations, and fine-tuning my oratory skills.
My next summer was also spent with Workforce Development, but this time around I worked closely with two recruitment directors. I learned more about the job hiring process by helping to screen candidate resumes against job profiles. Beyond my work with Workforce Development, I worked one-on-one with one of the Communication managers on writing and executing internal communications plans for a CBS’s Big Brothers Big Sisters fundraising campaign. This was one of my first times venturing out of Workforce Development so I was happy to begin making connections with others within the company.
Summer three presented new excitement. For the first half of the summer, I worked at the CBS Broadcast Center with CBS Newspath, the in house video affiliate service responsible for providing and finding needed video content for news packages. For six weeks, I helped process incoming requests and assisted news producers and photographers in their production of news packages. My favorite shoot was when I got to help interview fans on the red carpet of the Harry Potter Deathly Hollows US premiere. At Newspath, I learned how to access the CBS video archives and even helped manage Twitter and live web feeds for CBS Newspath Live News Services during some of the important news stories of the year such as the Casey Anthony trial and NASA’s final space mission For the second half of the summer, I worked with CBS Watch! magazine. With Watch! I learned a lot about magazine publishing and editing. I got to help secure artwork, as well as serve as an administrator for the Watch! Facebook page by performing daily maintenance and posting. I also helped manage the content management system that archived previous Watch! Magazines.
My last summer at CBS, I found myself interning with CBS Business Development for half of the summer. For seven weeks, I researched video on demand trends and presented my findings to the Business Development executives. The presentation ” Video on Demand: Competitor Analysis” covered the broadcast networks (CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX) video on demand offerings, ads, programming trends. I found the experience to be extremely challenging but rewarding. For the second half of the summer, I returned to Watch! magazine. Much of my daily routine remained the same from the previous summer, but I found that I was given increased responsibility and opportunities. For example, I got to assist at three NYC photo shoots, one of my favorites being an early morning shoot at Bergdorf Goodman with Anna Sophia Robb, where we got to shoot in the store before it opened.
I am so thankful for CBS’s partnership with the Emma L. Bowen Foundation. If it were not for CBS’s willingness to be on board with such a great scholarship program, I probably would not have been able to have such a diverse range of internship experiences. I also would not have been able to attend the foundation’s monumental annual summer conferences. Throughout the years, I have met so many influential people, many of whom I still keep in contact with today. I’ve learned so much about what it means to work in the corporate environment. I’ve discovered the power and importance of the media industry as well as the way it has changed and is still changing. These are things I would never have known without having such a hands-on internship experience. Though I’m sad I’ve completed my internship, I am so excited for my senior year at Princeton University. I know that I will be able to go into career fairs and job interviews with confidence. I can only hope that one day I will be able to help others the way I have been nurtured and taken care of these past summers. Thank you CBS and Emma Bowen for allowing me to have the best four years of my life!
Want to know more about me? Contact me at recampbe@princeton.edu