Last Day

Today is officially the last day of my internship! Meaning today I am continuing to wrap up projects and make sure everything is done. Also I need to make sure everything I have created is in my electronic portfolio so I have a copy.

Over the past year my internship at NEDC has taught me a lot. I have definitely developed my creative design skills and writing skills. I've improved editing copy and fixing grammar/spelling. This was a great internship and it really taught me a lot, I can't believe it's over and I'm graduating a few days!

This week I worked 16 hours

Wrapping up the semester

This week I am trying to finish up all my small projects I've started throughout the past year. Of course the main one would be the 2010 Abstract.... which is still waiting review and finalization.

Other than that nothing big just slideshows, letters and a few designs.

Proposals

This week I redesigned our proposal packet, the previous one was very outdated, and helped gather information for an upcoming proposal. Most of the information was already in the Abstract, which is still waiting final approval.

This week I worked 16 hours.

Computer evaluation time. I'm checking all the monitors, keyboards, CPUs, and software programs on all the computers in NEDC.

Hopefully my boss will get back to me this week about finalizing the Abstract.

This week I mostly worked on computers and finalized a few small projects. I had to run all over town yesterday to find computer adapters, it seemed that everywhere either was sold out or didn't carry them. Eventually I found them at RadioShack, which I had no idea even existed in Norman.

Last week I worked 16 hours, forgot to post that.

This week I worked 17 hours, had to run additional errands during lunch one day.

This week I am finishing up a powerpoint presentation for our new touch-screen monitor. Also I am helping Don write a letter about everything NEDC does for the community.

Still haven't heard a quote from Transcript Press, I will be calling and emailing again this week. This will make it at least a dozen times I have tried to get this quote from them in the past month.

COLI

Cost of Living Index collection was last Thursday, so this week I will be inputting all that data. I really like the reports they send analyzing the cost of loving around the US.

Other than that just putting final touches on the Abstract and maybe figuring out when to have Econ. Summ part 2! And maybe working on the National Weather Museum logo some more, I am so glad I took Ad Copy & Layout and know how to use Photoshop.

Econ Summit take 2 got postponed. So after weeks of going non stop things are finally slowing down for a little bit. That said I have COLI collection this weekend (Cost Of Living Index) so I will be driving all around Norman Thursday morning for work. I love getting the analysis of the COL across the nation, lets me look at different places I might want to live later in life.

I am not a graphic designer

That said, I'm creating a logo for the National Weather Museum. Now it's come a long long way from the first draft, but I'm still not sure how professional I can make this look. I have to bring in my laptop from home to work on it because my work computer only has Illustrator, and for what I need to do I need Photoshop. I'm sure you can do it on Illustrator, but I'm a lot better with Photoshop and actually know how to do what I have imagined in head. Not that I expect it to come out how I imagine it but still, this gives me the best chance of having it look nice.

Abstract.... again

Fixing the Abstract again. Just small changes that either I didn't catch or my boss wants changed. I proof read each page a dozen times, but because I'd been staring at the same thing for multiple months I'm not too surprised there were still a couple typos. After a while everything just blends together, they were easy to fix though. Now I'm trying to get a print estimate from Transcript Press, hopefully this time they will reply.

This week I worked 16 hours

Economic Summit Take 2

We are currently planning a follow-up to the Economic Summit to field any questions/concerns in regard to the bad press following the first one. Hopefully this will help improve relations with the community, we have already begun working on things with OU.

More crisis management experience!

Working on another press release for webaPeel and a letter to the NASA representative where we get our grants from. Over all a lot slower than it has been for the past couple weeks preparing for the Agio announcement.

Next week I will be talking with the PR rep from Agio again to analyze the success of the announcement and what we should be doing now.

This week I worked 17.5 hours.

Agio Announcement

Over 100 people came to the announcement yesterday! I met Andy Rieger, managing editor of the Norman Transcript, and Jason McCarty, public relations coordinator for the State Commerce. I helped set up for the announcement and the luncheon, but by that point there wasn't much left to do. I was running around before the event making sure the press release was sent out, everyone knew where it was and the programs were ready. It is so incredibly relieving to know that this event is done and it was such a success.

So far it has been picked up by the Norman Transcript, who printed the whole press release and then also wrote an article about the expansion, and KSBI 52 news had a 30 sec. clip over the announcement.

The location of the AGIO announcement is changing, and considering the event is one week from today that throws us a pretty big curve ball. Also I am still waiting on confirmation for the press release and invitation so I can send those out, I keep calling and talking to people there but because there are 5 people assigned to over see each step it's impossible to have anything finalized.

Lesson of the week: delegate to one to two people, simple tasks do not need a whole committee.

*Forgot to post again, this week I worked 16 hours

Spring Break

With the AGIO announcement next week I still had to do a couple things over spring break. They finally sent me a revised version of the invitation, and after a few more drafts we finalized that and sent it out.

I learned I need to constantly check my email, even when I'm not working. I remember Dr. Veil saying PR was a full time job, and you're never really completely on vacation. For the rest of the week I always had my phone on me and checked my work email everyday.

Total I worked 2 hours.

Following Suite

I am currently working on a announcement for a new company in Norman and with such am creating invitations and programs for the event. As of Tuesday I had only received a low quality copy of their logo, which made it very hard to design anything because I didn't know what the rest of their marketing materials looked like. Yesterday they sent me examples of stationary, business cards and presentation folders! I was able to break them apart and use the design, fonts, and high res logo and add all these items to my invitations and programs. Now everything matches and looks much more cohesive!

And I have officially turned in a final copy of the Abstract to my boss, hopefully I will be completely finished soon!

This week I worked 16 hours.

Real Crisis Time

While we had a mini crisis at the Summit, we are now handling a real one. Press coverage has not been very nice or accurate since the event. We are having to combat a reporter who didn't pay full attention to the speaker and therefore wrote a quite misguided article about the speaker and the purpose of the event.

This week I have a feeling I'm going to be doing some serious PR work to turn this around.

Mini crisis

Summit is over, there was a small crisis with the name tags and checking people in. Around 20 of the name tags were misspelt and had to be reprinted at the last minute, so when people were checking in I was trying to replace name tags as fast as possible. Also around 200 people had to sign in within a 20 min. time frame, which caused a little chaos in general. Everyone said the Summit was much better than years past and the updated style was well received. Overall I proved to myself that I can work under pressure and keep calm when an unforeseen crisis arises, which is a very valuable skill to have.

Now I am working on a dedication ceremony for AGIO next month, I have a meeting with the President of AGIO in an hour, and gathering my last piece of data for the Abstract. Almost done!

This week I worked 16.5 hours

Economic Summit Prep

Thursday I had to run errands to get ready for the Summit, finish up pamphlets and design a program for the event. (Last week I worked 16 hours)

Now the event is tomorrow! The office is going crazy trying to finish up last minute items. The program is still being finalized and hasn't even begun printing, we need around 300 for tomorrow.

Tomorrow I'll be up there working at 7 a.m. preparing for the meeting and registering people.

Entrepreneur's Conference

The second annual Oklahoma entrepreneur's conference is going on today and tomorrow, so we are in crunch time to prepare for it. The conference begins today at 12:30 p.m. and goes until 7 p.m. tomorrow night. NEDC is hosting two tables to promote the eTec incubators and hopefully find new tenants.

I have prepared a new brochure over eTec incubators and created a sign printed on foam board to hang above the tables. I sent in the order for the sign yesterday, then had to reformat it a little bit to ensure clear printing. Today they told me I needed to confirm the order before they would begin printing, we needed the sign by noon. Thankfully when I called to confirm the order and beg them to rush it they informed me it was already printed and ready to be picked up.

Next came finishing, editing and fixing the brochure and flyer followed by printing and folding.

Tomorrow morning I will be working the tables at the convention.

Right now my abstract file is 413 MB when converted to a pdf. Last years was 1.2 MB. Needless to say that's quite a difference, and entirely too large to be able to upload to a Web site and expect people to spend the time to download.

Goal for today: find a way to compress the file to 1/400 of its original size.

However this week I did successfully create another invititation, a bank letter, and a press release.

This week I worked 16 hours.

Onto the education section of the Abstract! Unfortunately most of the information I am finding is from the 07-08 school year, and I was really wanting info for the 08-09 year. However I did find enrollments for the 09-10 year which was exciting!

Overall, Oklahoma needs to work on education. Especially when compared with the nation as a whole. Researching all these different sections for the Abstract has really increased my awareness of the community in general and what we need to work on.

Thursday I forgot to blog, there was a lot going on at work.

This week I learned how to conduct an interview over Skype and improved my Adobe skills is Illustrator and Photoshop. I still need to figure out how to place the ghost boxes behind certain layers of the picture.

I worked for 16 hours.

Housing Data

This week I've been focusing on finding all the statistics needed for the Housing section of the Abstract. While there really aren't that many statistics on this page, they are incredibly difficult to find. I found a bunch of stats on different sites, none of which coordinated and in fact ranged from around 900 homes currently on the market to 1968 homes on the market. I have finally learned how to properly access the information from the City of Norman Web site and am on my way. However I realized all the statistics from previous years listed in lasts years Abstract aren't coherent with what is listed on this Web site, so now instead of simply adding a year I'm having to recalculate all the years from 2000 to 2009.

Thankfully, I have found a report that gives me the year end totals instead of me having to add up every month, as I was doing in the beginning.

Another plus- I now know how all about the real estate market in the Norman area, which will come in very useful when my fiance and I begin looking for a house in a couple of months.

Learning to Save

Yesterday I found all the information for the Health section of the Abstract, typed it in the Illustrator file, formatted it, designed it. Then when I go to shut down Illustrator and save the file 30 minutes later, Illustrator freezes and loses the whole page. Now I realize I should have saved the file as soon as I finished the new section, however I was still working on Abstract in general and the file takes 15 minutes to save. I make sure to save it every hour because I don't want to lose anything, but saving it every time I finish a section would waste way too much time throughout the day.

So today I redid the Health page and searched for housing statistics. I have almost all the stats I need, now I just have to make sense of them and add them to the Housing section. That will probably be a task for Monday as my day is almost done. Next week I also need to finished editing the picture of HealthPlex and work on getting the Summit press release printed in the transcript.

This week I worked 16 hours.

A new week, and I'm still working on this Abstract. I started this project back in November I believe, and while I've gotten a lot designed it won't be finished for quite some time. Actually the overall design is complete, there's just little tweaking done here and there as I continue to add in more information and pictures.

I've also done research one a new large chain looking at coming to Norman and found articles for the next issue of the monthly NEDC newsletter.

This week I worked a total of 16 hours.

Thursday I was assigned a press release over a product expansion for one of the companies NEDC helps develop. I have started doing research on this company because we do not have that much information about it and its product line. Also I started editing a photo of the new Healthplex center so it will work for the Abstract better.

In the past couple weeks I have done very well at managing my time and focusing on several projects at once. I still want to improve my Illustrator skills more, but I have learned a lot since I began designing the Abstract. I think further development of those skills will just come with time and practice.

Still working on the Abstract, slowly but surely gathering all the information for the book. It includes healthcare, education, housing, transportation, quality of life, shopping and plenty more... which adds up a lot of information that I don't have and can't seem to easily find. Thankfully another worker keeps track of statistics so that saves me a lot of time right there.

LAST WEEK

I worked 8 hours, most was spent catching up after not working for a month. Also I focused on media efforts for the Hitachi groundbreaking this past Monday (which I didn't even get to attend because I had class). However, I did get the Journal Record, Norman Transcript and the Daily Oklahoman to attend the ceremony! There were articles in all three newspapers, pictures in some articles, and even an article in the OU Daily.

Norman Economic Development Coalition

This week for the NEDC I'm still working on the 2010 Norman Economic Abstract. I started working on it last semester, probably around the end of November. It's a 16 page mini "magazine" almost all about Norman business environment, housing, jobs and other amenities Norman has to offer potential businesses. The abstract is handed out to all potential businesses when they request information about Norman, OK and is distributed through our office, the Norman CVB, OU and the Chamber I think.

This is a huge opportunity to showcase my design skills and my writing skills. Thankfully I took Publications last semester so I know more about how the layout and format should look. My boss has been impressed with what I've showed her so far, but I am still nervous about finishing up the whole project.