This summer, Youth Council member and two-time Enterprise intern, Jaida Da Luz, interned on Enterprise’s communications team. As the Communications Director, I requested Jaida join my team because she had a passion for communications and marketing. I am a believer that anyone can learn skills, but it is much harder to teach passion.

My goals for the internship were to teach useful skills that Jaida could apply anywhere but also to assign meaningful projects to benefit Enterprise for Youth. I scaffolded my approach, and first I had her catalog our photos by year and program/event using Airtable, a powerful filtering, sorting, and grouping tool. Once that was completed, I asked Jaida to design social media posts using Canva, an online design software. She drafted the posts from stories submitted by fellow summer interns and organized and scheduled them in Google Forms. During her internship, she strengthened her marketing skills by learning other software platforms and how they all worked together under the communications umbrella: WordPress (for creating blog posts), Hootsuite (for batch scheduling social media posts across platforms), iMovie, and Google Drive.

“When [Senior Program Director Meghan Smith] first suggested this internship, I mainly expected to do social media, but I did so much more! It was nice having so much control over the social media posts and putting a creative twist on them. The internship involved a lot more writing and organization than I thought there would be.

“I really liked that everything I was doing was benefitting Enterprise for Youth in some way. For example, organizing the Google folder would eventually help someone in the future, or creating an interesting iMovie will hopefully bring funds and more people into the organization. I liked being able to do tasks that I knew were going to help Enterprise in the long run. I have had some experience using iMovie, so it was fun collecting all the different photos, video footage, and music for the ‘What Youth Council Means to Me’ video!

“I learned from this internship that running social media is like a full-time job. It takes a lot of time to organize photos and come up with captions and stories to post on social media. Because of the time and effort that I put into making social media posts, I will definitely start to appreciate the everyday posts I see from different businesses and nonprofits.

“I really enjoyed working [at Enterprise for Youth] this summer! I was always curious about a career in communications, and now I can say that I have some experience!”

—Jaida Da Luz, Communications intern

I had a great experience working with Jaida, so much so, I was moved to write this recommendation for her Linkedin profile:

“Jaida was an amazing communications intern. She is sharp and picks things up super fast. She is a team player and works well independently to knock out projects with gusto. From drafting and designing social media posts, to editing video, she owned each of her projects. I’d recommend her for any communications team and will greatly miss her contributions.”

Rizal Adanza
Communications Director