Undergraduate Blog / Career Development

Always be Flexible, Always be Ready

Flexibility is a key to success. As an intern working in Research and Development in an innovative public media company such as WGBH, I am asked to complete a wide range of tasks and given the opportunity to voice my thoughts and ideas for new products and projects. I am often excited to be at work because none of my days are repetitive and I get to see what I learned at Babson in action.

One of the opportunities I was given was to perform market and industry research for a proposal to create WGBH’s Lifelong Learning platform for users aged 55 and older. In this process, I looked into different organizations and companies that were already in this space and what they have been working on. I also helped design and conduct phone interviews with outside advisors. In addition to research, I am working with a professor from Tufts University to film and put together a prototype of a sample lesson to be used in this platform.

Another opportunity I was thankful for was a chance to make a presentation within WGBH. I was able to present on the value of virtual reality in education along with running a hands on demonstration on exploration and museum tour style apps on an oculus rift headset and on cardboard headsets suitable for smartphones. Virtual reality in educational institutions can provide students an immersive experience to cultures and sites around the world that normally would be out of reach financially. The experience and feedback from presenting outside of a classroom environment was invaluable.

A third experience was not what I expected at all. This was the opportunity to work with drones. The project involving drones is to broaden the scope of video media and photography by taking aerial footage with drones. Drones can collect footage and news reports from locations too dangerous for a human cameraman and can provide a different perspective to how we see the world. Although there was a lot of troubleshooting and legal research involved on what we can and cannot do with drones, it was a fun experience.

Interning at WGBH is super fun and allowed me to exercise all of my skills. To succeed, I needed to be flexible and adapt to the tasks at hand. It was exciting to know that I can be working on something unexpected and new every week at work.