Biz Comm and Digital Publishing

On Friday, I went to Career Services and met with one of the drop-in career peers to review my resume and to discuss careers in digital publishing. The peer that I met with was very helpful and was open to critiquing and editing my resume on the spot. She went through my resume piece by piece and focused on each section thoroughly. She rearranged sections of my resume and also gave me a paper that has “buzz words” to use when describing experiences. The peer also went through the job descriptions I had and changed it to sound more professional. She went sentence by sentence and circled buzz words that I can use to change up the wording. After reviewing my resume, the peer said that my resume was good compared to others but I would have to work on the formatting and organization of it.

Resume

Buzz words

The last thing the career peer talked to me about was digital publishing. She did not have too much information on digital publishing but she gave me a Career Pathways sheet that is specifically for business communication students. The paper listed common pathways or careers that business communication students can go into. There was a specific section that listed internship sites for Stevenson students. One of the sub sections that was listed was “Publications and Advertising.” In this section, there were a list of businesses and organizations that past Stevenson students have interned with. This list included Baltimore Business Journal, Baltimore Research, Baltimore Sun, Bancroft Press, and many others. The peer also mentioned that if I want to learn more about careers in digital publishing, I can meet with a digital publishing advisor who would give me more information.

Career Pathways

Career Pathways p.2

Journey to Career Services

Last Wednesday, I visited the Office of Career Services, and initially met with the drop-in counselors. they talked to me about all the services that they offer, and even worked with me on doing my resume, which is one of the services that they discussed with me. I received samples resumes and a pathway of keys things to look out for when making a resume and looking for a job in Fashion Merchandising, which is my major. I later met with Jean Turner, who discussed with me what digital publishing was in a general sense, and what I thought of when we think of what digital publishing entails in the Fashion industry. Together, we came up with magazines, fashion books, blogs, literally its everything that is online. Digital publishing is everything that we look at on a daily basis. We moved into then why this is so important to understand.

lastly, Jean talked to me about goals i have, especially those pertaining to my future career. for me, my goals are to eventually be in a Lead Buyer position or Lead on Visual Merchandising position at a corporate level retail facility, like Target for example. knowing about digital publishing in these positions would be exceptionally helpful as there are many tools that I would be using in this field that would help me to improve in my job, as well as Target has their own digital publishing on their website.

Career Services: Entrepreneurship

After attending the careers entrepreneurship panel, I was able to gain a lot of knowledge about what it’s like running your own business. The panel was made up of a select few business owners and entrepreneurs that had a range of different background. From young to older, from college drop outs to college grads. They all were genuinely unique, which was great to see. Their uniqueness offered great insight on entrepreneurship. The panel was hosted by Stevenson’s own Jeannine Morber who is a lecturer within the school of business. She founded the Morber Marketing group in 2010 with the goal of helping businesses integrate new marketing technologies into their current marketing processes. The panel included Garret Pfiefer who now works for his family business at Maryland Brand Management which produces all kinds of merchandise that are tailored for specific companies. Another panelist includes Andy Brown the founder and CEO of Eat Pizza. Eat Pizza is a frozen pizza manufacturing company that covers more than half the nation. Andy also owns a music entertainment company and a local pizzeria.  There is also Elizabeth Trimm who is the hunt valley branch manager for Rent-A-Car. This specific branch is the largest in the Baltimore area. Another panelist was Andrew Murphy who is the partner and owner of Flying Frog Publishing, which specializes in the publishing of children’s books. Chris Daley who is the founder and principal of Whirlaway, LLC. Chris’s company specializes in public relations, specifically media relations, social media strategy, content creation, brand building and sales. Last, but not least, John Dinkel is the principal at Dinkel Business Development, LLC. This company is a business development strategic advisory based in Baltimore City.

This careers’ panel connected to my personal career goals more than I thought it would. As someone who is in the technology industry, I didn’t think a lot of this advice would be relevant to me. I thought this panel would be mainly how to run a business. Instead is was more about how to properly run your life, and that make include running a business. This was good for me because a lot of their general advice wasn’t all about running the best business or making the most money, but rather how to have the most enjoyable life. This connects to our class because they preached that advertising is a huge piece to a successful business, and in order to advertise correctly in 2019, you need to be able to utilize the internet.

Life is too Short to Wait

Last Wednesday I attending the Entrepreneurship panel with the hope that I would be able to gain a better understanding of entrepreneurship and if it were something I might want to consider. I was a bit disappointed as I felt like I didn’t gain very much by attending the event. I will say that the members of the panel were passionate about their business. Specifically Andrew Murphy from Flying Frog Publishing and Andy Brown from Eat Pizza. They spoke about how they got into entrepreneurship and how it started back when they were in high school. One of the biggest things I felt the panel was trying to express to us was that it is hard work and you will face a lot of people saying no, or it is not going to work. I felt like everyone really lingered on these things and that it was really nothing knew for me.

While I feel a bit disappointed about the event I feel like there were two things that really stuck out to me. The first being the passion and excitement that Andy had. And I felt like he presented it in such a way that I was curious to hear more about his story. Even if I felt like I didn’t take much away, I like to hear him talk. Another thing that really stuck out to me was when John Dinkel talked about how his sister-in-law passed away which caused him and his wife to realize that life it too short to wait and that if they wanted to start this business, then they should do it now. It gave me a little bit of a perspective on taking the leap into business.

As a film major I have always thought about starting a video production business. I am in the process of trying to formulate the business and the brand. I feel like digital publishing is a topic that would be really good for me and helpful. While I felt like the panel discussion did not touch on digital publishing very much, I do feel like this coarse has some potential to be very helpful to me.

Digital Publishing in Graphic Design

There are a lot of different types of digital publishing, magazines, articles, social media posts, ebooks, and more. And behind all of these different medias there is a lot of people helping create it and pull it together, but one that may be forgotten is the graphic designer, my career field of choice. We can design the imagery that goes along with that perfect marketing social media post, we design that layout of the magazine article, home page, and more, we even help design the ebooks by choosing the font family, font size, headings, and more. Yes, those simple details were probably help chosen by a graphic designer. All of it may not seem interesting, you may wonder who gets excited about choosing a font, a graphic designer does. We harshly judge websites, social media posts, magazines, menus, and more because blue is not just blue it is indigo, royal, navy, or baby blue. The fonts that all look identical are different because Times New Roman is definitely not Minion Pro and Arial is not even close to Helvetica. We can focus on the kerning, leading, cropping, negative space, and all the other little details because we learned how to have the eye for those things specifically.

More than taking those art and design classes, I have been focusing on some marketing classes, my goal specifically as a designer is to join a marketing, advertising, or social media team. So, taking a class in digital publishing will help me more so, because now I will be able to design those posts, but I also may learn more about the content of those posts so that I can do both for the company. I am hoping this class will get better at knowing all of the content, visual, linguistic, aural, and more to know when to use what and how to produce the content all around in a successful way. It could potentially give me a step up from other designers in the marketing field to be able to know more about different aspects of producing digital media. Then I can focus more on just the colors, fonts, and small design details, but the words written, the purpose of the post, the background and context. Digital publishing and graphic design very much go hand in hand and I know this class can help me in my career goals.