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Mentorship July 6, 2018
Turns out, learning these skills wasn't too hard at all.
Any good program will provide you with opportunities to learn. A great program will provide you with a decent amount of these opportunities. You’ll do a bit more than fetch coffee for the full-time employees.
If it’s really great, what you learn will be more valuable than some harsh realization, like that sometimes you have to work with people you hate. You’ll learn the hard skills — the concrete ones you can list on your resume and wow future employers with. That’s what ENTITY Academy was for me.
Prior to the Academy, my list of hard skills was a little too short for my liking. At 20 years old, I didn’t have a ton of work experience — but over the course of this program, I’ve been formally trained in several skills sets that I know will be of use to me throughout my career. Here are three that I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to develop in my time with my ENTITY Academy mentors.
Before learning from my ENTITY Academy mentors, I had heard of search engine optimization. As to how to actually do the optimization part, I was completely clueless.
Now, I can easily navigate the world of SERPs (that’s search engine result pages). The vernacular of search engine optimization is embedded into my brain for all time. Never again will I look at an article without trying to figure out what its keyword might be.
To be entirely honest, figuring out the world of keywords and SEO was not the most glamorous part of learning to write for an online publication. At times, I felt it a little tedious and almost became disenchanted with the reality of internet writing. To some extent, you do have to tailor it to maximize your possibilities of ending up on the search page.
As disenchanted as I may have felt, I also realized SEO skills are necessary. It doesn’t matter if you write an amazing piece if no one sees it, after all.
Not to brag, but I think I may be a graphic design queen now.
Okay, maybe not. But now I actually possess a very rudimentary understanding of Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign! Considering I really didn’t know how these applications were used before other than for editing (clearly I had a very sophisticated understanding), this is a pretty big deal for me. And it’s all thanks to my ENTITY Academy mentors.
I’ve always enjoyed being creative, but I’ve never been the most artistic girl out there. I wish I could draw, but alas, there are some talents I am simply not blessed with. However, learning how to properly use Photoshop and Illustrator allowed me to express my artistic side and create some graphics that weren’t too hard on the eyes if I do say so myself. The last time I was genuinely proud of my own artwork was probably the second grade, so learning graphic design was a pretty gratifying experience.
I didn’t know what WordPress was before this program. I had never blogged before. Now, I’m pretty damn proficient with the program and its tools. As someone who wants to be a writer, it’s been a very eye-opening and useful experience learning this program. There isn’t too much to say about this one other than that it’s a great tool for writers, and using it every day has taught me a lot about formatting articles to make them look professional and readable.
Well, maybe I could have. But it would have been much more difficult.
Ultimately, I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to work so closely with industry professionals eager to impart their knowledge on the next generation of writers and creatives.
