Internship at Rsquare Media – A fusion of coding with social media marketing
About the Author: Surbhi Inani, a student of Carnegie Mellon University, talks about her internship that fostered her to become a jack of all trades.
During the three months of summer, I took up a social media and business analyst internship at Rsquare Media Inc., a creative internet marketing company headquartered in Uniondale, Long Island, New York. While flipping through Carnegie Mellon University’s job portal, Handshake, I came across the company; it offered a letter of reference after the internship and mentorship throughout my under-graduation. It was unpaid for the summer, but I would be paid per hour if I continued to work there through the next semester. I applied for the internship by submitting my resume through the portal. After my application was accepted, a Skype interview was scheduled since I was in Mumbai at the time. The interviewer, Rajiv Jadhav, CEO, asked me what I worked on during the two years of my college and what I aspired to be. He specifically asked me why I wanted a social media internship in spite of being an electrical and computer engineering major. I told him that since technology is being used to propagate products and services extravagantly, I wanted to learn WordPress, graphic design tools for editing, etc. to stay on top of my competition for my clients. He was impressed by the interview and told me that I would be hired if I could showcase any blogs or projects that I had made in the past. I sent him an email with links to YouTube videos of my programming projects and blog articles from the college newspaper to showcase my prior work. The company sent me my offer letter the next week.
This was a remote internship that I started in the US and continued with in India. I had the responsibility of both technical work and social media. I was in charge of the website blogs and Facebook posts of three clients of Rsquare Media – LiveVideoMonitor.com, which supplied home security systems and wireless camera; Premier Social Adult Day Services, which provided a physical, cultural and social care program for seniors to improve their well-being and enhance their sense of community; and Carelink Home Care services, which was a health aid service aiming at helping people with nursing personnel. I researched into these companies and learnt the various ways in which companies used technology and web to maximize their reach and how their services excelled via the use of proper equipment and up-to-date software. After researching the need, history, usefulness, and targeted audience of the products of the clients, I created a blog article on a product each week and published it on their respective websites, which were built on WordPress. This required me to learn HTML design and coding and use graphic design tools like Paint.net to customize images for the posts on the blog and on social media. Then, I would promote the blog posts on their respective Facebook pages via scheduling tool. I also redirected the traffic to clients’ Facebook fan page to hype the product before its launch.
For the technical work, I was a part of a coding project called CUBENTS (Comprehensive Utility Board for Equation Text and Graphics), an interactive content editing web application for creating presentations and lectures using text, equations, and graphics to bring static content to life using animations. The front end of the application was coded in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (libraries: Fabric.js, CKEditor, MathJax) while the backend and the database were created using MySQL, Java, AJAX, JSP, and JDBC. Using the concept of Massive Open Online Courses, this web application could be used by companies to create and display their services. I worked on drawing graphical shapes on the web board using Fabric.js and applying animations to them. I designed graphic toolbars which facilitated the editing of different features of the shapes like line width, smoothness, position, etc. I hard-coded various animations like fade in-out, draw, disappear, etc. for each shape. Then, I worked with the UI coder to simplify buttons on the graphics toolbar to make it user-friendly. I coordinated with the text-editor coder and equation-editor coder to ensure that all the elements were compatible with HTML. I also ensured that the graphical objects were being sent to and retrieved from the database correctly.
At Rsquare Media, I enhanced my knowledge of online communities on social media, social media marketing, and social media management. I also developed my business analysis and reporting skills. I learnt to support company’s technological clients by understanding their business, their customers, and the markets they usually operate in. I was also a part of the content strategy conception and execution. I learnt not only time management, adhering to deadlines, and keeping up with fellow coders but also to work as a team. I developed a working knowledge of GitHub and learnt to write project reports and document programs so as to make our project open-sourced.
This internship has been an extraordinary eye opener when it comes to working in the real world for technology clients and creating a web application with real-time uses. It has been a privilege to work under Mr. Rajiv Jadhav, and I will be grateful for his guidance and support forever.
Do you also want to taste the colours of different aspects of technology? Check out these latest programming and social media marketing internships.
Editor’s note – If you also have an interesting story to share, you can now participate in Your Internship Story Contest 2017 and win cash prizes and goodies worth INR 1 Lac!
