Recent Posts
Mentorship August 1, 2019
Turns out I've always been one of the #WomenThatDo.
ENTITY Academy is more than just a fun experience. ENTITY Academy is a summer packed with mentorship, networking, and intensive learning that taught me hard skills my undergraduate courses didn’t.
I got my bachelor’s degree in Multimedia Journalism. I thought I knew pretty much everything about journalistic writing, but I was so wrong.
My undergrad courses taught me a lot about AP style – what to capitalize, what numbers to spell out, how to properly use titles, etc. Standard AP style rules that all journalists have to know. But all I knew was how to write, not how to distribute.
My articles from school didn’t get a lot of traffic and I wasn’t exactly in love with the topics I covered. But ENTITY helped me see that I am more than my degree, I am more than what I’ve written in the past, and I am more than capable of reaching whatever goals I set for myself.
When ENTITY introduced Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on the second day of the Academy, I was intrigued. I was absolutely dumbfounded when I realized I had never learned SEO in any of my undergrad classes. SEO is so important in driving traffic to the articles you write and your website. It dramatically affects your article’s Google ranking.
I wrote for school-based newspapers so I never had to worry about where my articles ranked on Google. But as I listened during the SEO sessions, I made sure to take notes on everything. I knew that every bit of information I heard was going to be vital to getting more article views and driving website traffic.
Although it was daunting at first, learning about keywords, volume, relevancy, and trends was no easy task. But even if I got stuck trying to find a keyword with the perfect balance of volume and competition, I knew I could reach out to an ENTITY mentor for help.
Learning SEO has drastically changed the way I write my own articles and how I read others. I know I’ll take this skill with me throughout my career as a journalist. And, I get to thank ENTITY Academy for that.
I believe the best thing that I gained as an ENTITY Academy mentee is confidence. The ENTITY Academy mentorship program was critical to my self-confidence. Since I graduated, I felt that I couldn’t be anything other than a writer. I love to write, don’t get me wrong, but I felt trapped in that mindset.
As an ENTITY mentee, I was assigned an internal mentor who inspired me with her drive and motivation to succeed. She was supportive and even reached out when I had a family emergency towards the end of my program. Thanks to her approachable demeanor, I knew that I could always ask her for help with anything.
My IM made me realize that just because my degree was in journalism, that doesn’t mean I had to just be a journalist. Her passion for the media field helped me see that there are actually so many jobs that interest me that I had previously ignored because of my journalism degree.
Seeing my IM put her best foot forward in each interview she landed prompted me to be more curious. I began looking at various media jobs and found that I was more than qualified for a lot of them.
Mentorship, truly, is one of the best things I’ll take away from this summer. Forming a connection with my Internal Mentor, amongst other inspiring mentors, has been amazing. While working with her, I felt that I could always count on her for solid advice. I know that we’ve created a friendship that will last for years to come.
There aren’t many journalism opportunities in my hometown. I was never taught how to network and get connections. ENTITY Academy changed that.
I used to be too nervous to approach people because I feared I wasn’t important enough. My time at ENTITY taught me that if I don’t use my voice, I’ll never be heard. So, I began speaking up a lot more than I would back home.
One of the greatest connections I made was with Emmy-Award Nominated KTLA Reporter, Christina Pascucci. I was intimidated by her presence at first. However, as she told us her story, I realized she actually worked for her position and wasn’t there because of sheer luck.
Pascucci was able to connect me to a Forbes contributor who then gave me the contact information for an editor of a local Los Angeles publication. I wouldn’t have had the courage to speak up to Pascucci in the first place if it weren’t for ENTITY.
ENTITY Academy gave me one of the best summers I’ve ever had. Not only did I grow my skill set as a journalist, but I also gained friends and mentors that I can count on for the rest of my life.
Every part of the program – from the hard skills training, to the soft skills workshop, to the mentorship – was so fruitful and full of information that I will take with me throughout my career.
If you ever get the chance to join the next ENTITY Academy, do it. You’ll learn valuable hard and soft skills that can propel you forward in a career you actually love. It can be scary not knowing what you’re going to do with your life, especially post-grad. But, ENTITY gave me the confidence to ask for what I want, and then go for it with everything I have.
