I had never heard of Advertising Age before this summer. In fact, I knew very little about what any aspect of my experience as an ASME intern would be like — I’d never worked a full-time gig and never lived in New York City. I certainly wasn’t an expert in the advertising industry. I submitted Ad Age as my preferred publication based solely on the job description; for me, all that mattered was that I’d be doing my own reporting, raking in the bylines and growing as a journalist and a young professional. I feel lucky to be able to say that my experience was as fulfilling, challenging and rewarding as I hoped it’d be.

    Maybe working at a trade magazine catering to marketing execs and industry creatives isn’t quite as sexy a prospect as joining the staff at a more mainstream brand. But I wouldn’t trade feeling like an important part of the team and having the opportunity to apply skills like interviewing, writing, copy editing and putting together content for social media. Like at any other internship, some of my days in the office were slower than others. For the most part, though, I was busy working on stories I wrote myself or co-wrote with a reporter — I certainly never grabbed coffee for anyone.

   Since I’m not into advertising itself, I was forced to learn quite a bit as I went. Feigning competence proves to be a really valuable skill when you’re having phone conversations with chief marketing officers and the ad agencies behind all your favorite TV commercials. On the day a reporter assigned me a assigned a story about Fruity Pebbles’ recent foray into virtual reality marketing, I scheduled four interviews with representatives from the Post brand, creatives who produced the VR content and people who developed the distribution platforms on which virtual reality runs. I went from having a vague idea of what VR even is, to writing an in-depth story on a real-life VR campaign, in the span of a day and a half.

   When I wasn’t doing hard-hitting reporting on my cereal beat (seriously, I wrote several stories on cereal marketing), I was growing Ad Age’s social media presence.