Part 1/3: Why did I want to work as a marketing intern for Elsevier?

This is Karen Nguyen, the current Library Connect marketing intern for Elsevier in San Diego. In the next couple of weeks, I'm posting here some thoughts about my experience as an intern for Elsevier.

What’s my background? I graduated from UCSD in June with a BA in Interdisciplinary Computing and the Arts (ICAM). See my ICAM projects here. People always ask me what ICAM is and I've crafted a one sentence explanation for it: "A degree focusing on all aspects of new media, from graphic design to computer programming and anything digital in between." The next thing they ask is: "So, what can you do with it?" That question always stumps me.

There’s a variety of professions open to a versatile degree like ICAM. As I was looking up possible career paths, I stumbled upon librarianship. I enjoy books and helping people, I thought, this would be worth investigating. At first, I was skeptical about how my concentration and librarianship would mesh together. Fortunately, I found this internship which focuses on the library community and where my skill set was applicable – marketing in the Internet realm.

Within the first week of work, my vision of librarianship was changed drastically because I got to attend the SLA-San Diego Fall Seminar. The topic was Web services, and speakers dealt with website usability, evaluation of new Web technology and Web analytics - all things that I am interested in and hope to explore further. This internship has given me that opportunity by allowing me to delve into and experiment with Web tools on the marketing end. Now, the thought of combining my degree and librarianship doesn’t seem so peculiar to me at all.

That’s it for today. Next week, I’ll put up a post talking about specific projects I've been working on and how I’ve handled the workload that comes with being Elsevier's library marketing intern.