Synchronized Skating Summer Update--Martha Buckley
8/5/2009 12:00:00 AM | Synchronized Skating
Martha Buckley - August 5, 2009
Is it really August already? Wow, the summer could not be going by any faster! But I can't complain because I have had an awesome couple of months. Up on the North Shore of Massachusetts in Essex, my summer has been filled with working at my internship, visiting friends, going to the beach and of course lots of skating!! I have gotten to visit friends from Miami as well. Over the 4th of July weekend I went to Weston, Connecticut, to visit and meet up with friends. Then in early July, teammate Christina Lee came to visit for a weekend.
Initially my summer was slow to start because a lot of my friends from home didn't get out of school until the third or fourth week in May and my internship didn't begin until the third week of May either. I was able to get on the ice a ton, visit with family and even got to visit with teammates Johanna Jackson and Adrienne Berkowitz. Little did I know that those two "boring" weeks would certainly be made up for during the whole rest of the summer.
My internship this summer has been unbelievable and so valuable. I work Monday through Friday from 9-5 in both the Public Relations and Community Relations departments, respectively, at the corporate headquarters for Staples (the office superstore) in Framingham, Massachusetts. I had done an unpaid internship with the PR department at Staples for a month during my senior year of high school, so I was really excited to go back and work for my boss again and to see everyone that I had worked with.
With two members of our small seven-person team out on maternity leave, I found myself "thrown" right into the thick of PR my very first day back! I was given projects galore and things to get moving on without much explanation. While it was overwhelming at first, I completely had a first-hand experience of the craziness that occurs during "Back-To-School" and how public relations is handled.
One of my biggest--and probably coolest--projects that I have worked on was helping coordinate the logistics of one of our Community Relations campaigns. Staples partnered with DoSomething.org to create a national school supply drive that benefits underserved youth nationwide. It is called the "Do Something 101 School Supply Drive", and our spokesperson for the whole campaign is Grammy-winning singer/songwriter Ciara. Essentially, the Do Something 101 drive gives people an opportunity to give back and support underserved youth in their community by encouraging teens to run drives that collect supplies to donate.
We have organized so many logistics from social media outreach (Twitter, Facebook pages, blog sites) to physically getting thousands of people nationwide to participate and donate supplies to kids who are truly in need. We also provide teens the materials they need to run the supply drives in their own communities while our stores nationwide are also participating through collecting from customers as well. It has been highly successful and a really unique project to work with.
I have been responsible for doing my part in just about everything that goes on daily at Staples in the PR department from contacting reporters to contacting non-profit organizations about supporting their educational programs. I also had the opportunity to be a program manager on an intern initiative project, which was really cool as well. I coordinated a group of interns to visit our local Boys & Girls Club in Framingham and we got to hang out with the kids for a whole day, so that was fun too!
The most stressful and memorable week at Staples was during the Michael Jackson memorial. A member of our team who handles all reporter inquiries was out on vacation the week of the memorial, so I was then in charge of answering all emails and phone calls from reporters. We had reporters calling and inquiring from all around the country every hour about our affiliation with the Michael Jackson memorial because it was at the Staples Center. Interestingly enough, we had nothing to do with it at all so it was very challenging to handle. Let me tell you that was quite the week!
Overall, it has been an unbelievable and rewarding internship that I am so grateful to have had. I have learned so much about corporate public relations and so much about the underpinnings of so many different departments at Staples as well.
While the summer has been highly consumed by my internship, especially with an hour and a half commute each way, I found time to have another interesting experience this summer. In June I was recruited into taking the place of an old dance team member and friend after she badly injured herself at a competition a month before the team's nationals. I had to learn three routines in two days and perform in a show and then I had to also compete with the team a month later at nationals in Springfield, Massachusetts. Needless to say, life got crazy during June and July but the team went to nationals and our routines won gold! It was fun to reconnect with old friends and to compete with the dance team again. I do have to admit, I was extremely nervous to be back on stage again but once I was out there I felt like I had never left.
After all the craziness and as the summer is winding down, I am so excited and looking forward to getting back to Oxford, but not before some friends from Miami come to visit this weekend. Teammates Sarah Arnold and Christina Lee are coming from Wisconsin and New Jersey to hang out and then it is time to focus on the last two weeks of my internship and off to Oxford. I cannot wait to be back!
This is a continuation in a series of updates from the Miami University synchronized skaters throughout the summer.
Players Mentioned
