Wow, these past couple of months have been crazy, hence the inability to be active with posts. As I believe I mentioned before, FWOpera has asked me to stay on through the end of December to help them strategically plan their JFK Symposium that will precede the 2016 Festival, featuring the world premiere of JFK the opera. It’s pretty cool! I’ve really been enjoying my time here and have had the opportunity to pitch media, write press releases, and much more. I’m doing a lot of things that most interns don’t get to do and I have to say that is primarily because my managers see my potential and trust me enough to do these things. It’s really awesome.

A lot of things have happened, I’ve been recruited for the AT&T Business Sales Leadership Development Program, which I am probably going to decline, and I met with some people in Denver/Boulder to discuss their market and job opportunities. Needless to say, I’m making my steps to be prepared for life after college. I do graduate in the fall, after all! Which is only a few months away. It’s hard to imagine that in 5 months I will no longer be in school. Yay!

So, what are my next steps? I have convinced my brother and best friend to get jobs with a notable airline, which I’m getting the perks of. We just visited Portland and I believe we are going to either Roswell or Santa Fe next week. But most importantly, I will be using this free-flight opportunity to fly to D.C. at the beginning of August where I will be doing a two week intensive program at the Osgood Center with a focus on foreign policy. This is a program that my mom did and that the rest of my family has either done something similar, or came close to it. I am the only one in my family that hasn’t been to DC! This program will get me in the Pentagon as well as several embassy’s and other exciting places. I’m pumped! I have also been reaching out to different PR firms in D.C. to hopefully meet with people and see if maybe DC is the right place for me.

Over the next few months I will be flying all over the country. Partially in support of my new blog, but also with the hopes of  meeting industry professionals and figuring out which city is the right one for me. We shall see what is to come…right now I have my eyes set on The White House.

You may be wondering what has been going on for the past couple months since I haven’t been updating my blog. The truth is, a lot! At one point this semester I was doing three internships working a part-time job (plus driving for Lyft) and attending school full-time. To put it simply, I was incredibly busy. So here’s a recap:

In April I ended my internship at SMPR due to personal issues and, quite honestly, feeling like I was not really being utilized to my full potential. Krista had a ton of things planned for us that semester with Big D reads and it was getting to be way too hectic to keep up with everything. I was offered a position with Fort Worth Opera in their marketing department with the guarantee that I would be producing real things. So come the last couple weeks of April, I was just juggling D and FWO.

Krista and I had an incredibly successful month with our Big D Reads campaign. You can head over to both the projects page and events to see more of what we accomplished.

I’m incredibly excited to announce that FWO has since offered me an extension on my internship through December so that I can plan and implement a student focused strategic plan, as well as help with our strategic plan for JFK and our JFK Symposium. A lot of exciting things are coming!

This week has truly been a roller coaster of events. Thank God it was spring break so I didn’t have to deal with school at the same time, but here’s the low-down.

Several weeks ago I applied and interviewed for FleishmanHillard for a full-time, paid internship. I was super stoked. My interview had gone really well and I was certain I would be selected for a writing test. 

And then the storms came. Everything iced over and everything got screwed up. Fast forward to this week, I’m freaking out. This internship was my top choice and I’m not good enough?! So I decided to send them an email asking why I wasn’t good enough. 

Needless to say, I’m a dingus. I took my writing test the next day! So yay! I’m still in the running. Other good news, I’m now Yelp Elite! 



This past week I took a break from my internships (for the most part) in order to put in some full-time hours at Everything But Water. While I truly enjoy working in retail, this recent endeavor was bananas. You have not seriously worked a retail shift until you work in a swimwear store for nine hours straight in a neighborhood where the women love to travel, but what they love even more is to do it in style.

In order to tie everything that I will be covering, you have to understand the kind of shoes I wear to work. The floor at EBW is Spanish tile. The floor is beautiful! The floor is oh so easy to clean! What the floor isn’t, is comfortable. The first day on the job I wore heels (I thought they were required) and regretted it, but my feet weren’t dying just yet. The next shift, I wised up and decided to wear boots instead. Oh, how I wish I had a time machine! By the end of the day I could not walk. I kid you not. I had to drag my chubby body up the stairs and slither into bed like a snake. So, after that I quickly learned, “Cute doesn’t matter.” I borrowed a pair of my Mom’s old work shoes and have been mostly pain-free ever since.

Until I worked 30 hours and my feet were starting to feel it with another shift to go. The last eight hour shift I had my feet were sore and I began praying that the 18 hours I had until the big DIFFA event would be long enough to prepare me for heels. And then I remembered a trick my Mom told me about:

Life Hack: Painless Heels

You can click the picture that will take you to an article detailing this little trick, but basically the idea is that taping the 3rd and 4th toes relieves pressure that builds up on the ball of your foot. More specifically, there is a nerve there that causes the pain. I am new to the world of heels and desperately wish I did not have to wear them, but at the same time, they’re pretty fabulous.

Speaking of fabulous, the DIFFA event was a true success. I have to hand it to the women at Strauss Marketing and PR, because they really pulled out all the stops. I was in charge of checking in media and I guess you could say directing people and answering questions in a pretty general manner. But while one passerby said I must have gotten the “short stick”, I sure looked great while sitting there!

Look at that lighting! Fun fact, all the draping at the event was done by my boyfriend’s company, Quest Drape. Probably the nicest party we’ve “been” to, albeit not at the same time. This was my first fashion show and it was amazing. This experience gave me a new taste for something I had never considered a career in (after I turned 14): fashion. The DIFFA event was truly a success and I am so glad I was able to participate.

What I thought was going to be a productive and overwhelming week turned into something more like a daze. I went into D Magazine on Thursday, after having spent most of the week trapped in my house, thinking that the worst of the weather was over and it was time to get back to work. Little did I know, Mother Nature was just getting started.

Thursday I went in still feeling pretty cruddy from the upper-respiratory-what-have-you I’m currently dealing with. My supervisor, Krista, was very sweet and told me to take it easy. I ended up attending a training session on some new software we will be using in conjunction with Coalition for a New Dallas and then I just spent the rest of the day working with that. I was able to talk to a librarian in Dallas to set up some interviews for my Big D Reads blog (starting in March!) and that was it. I went home, did my taxes, chugged a bottle of NyQuil and fell asleep.

Friday I wake up to snow, like the weather had forecasted, and then headed in to Strauss Marketing and PR. By the time I got there my head was pounding and I thought I was on the verge of death. They sent me out to run an errand and while I was with our client my mom called, here’s how that went:

Mom: “Did you go into work?”
Me: “Yes. Why?”
Mom: “Look at the weather! You have to go home! It’s icing everywhere and you won’t be able to make it back.”

I head outside and see that the snow is falling heavier, but generally the weather seems fine. It wasn’t until I got back to the office and checked the traffic report online that I saw there were highways already shut down that I needed to use to get home. Great. Fantastic. I’m sick and stuck 30 miles away from home. I explain this to my supervisors, to which they respond, “Oh, no. We’ve already decided to send you home.”
So I head out assuming it’ll take me about an hour (20 minutes longer than usual) and that I can totally make it before dying. Oh, how I was wrong. So, so very wrong.

Fast forward 3 hours and I’m finally pulling into my driveway. As soon as I step out of my car I immediately throw-up (sorry!) on my lawn. Cinnamon Toast Crunch has definitely tasted better than in that moment. My boyfriend and my brother come running out of the house to help carry my upstairs to my death bed.

The bright side to all of this? I had four math assignments, two mid-term exams, two Criminal Justice assignments, and a German assignment all due this weekend. I was stressing about it all week wondering when I would have time, and then Mother Nature bittersweetly gave me the time. I also got to play in the snow with my boyfriend and Courage, which was awesome. Pics below!

Since I am starting to experience some horrible cabin fever, I decided that today would be a great day to start my running blog! I will be using this space to not only have a history to look back on, but also to allow possibly future employers to get to know me on a slightly personal (yet still professional) level. I hope you enjoy!

This past week Texas experienced it’s first, and most likely only, “snow” days. If you live in Texas, you know that we very rarely get snow. Usually what ends up shutting down the entire metroplex is a combination of sleet and freezing rain, ultimately resulting in iced over roads for a couple days. Last year we had to deal with the Ice Apocalypse (twice!), this week has been more along the lines of a minor plague. Lucky for me, I have been sick this entire time so I have been very grateful for my time off.

Just to give some background, I am a full-time student taking 15 hours at UTA. I am an active member of PRSSA at UTA and I’m in the process of starting a new Social Media club on campus. On the side I work as a Keyholder at Everything But Water in Dallas as well as manage a friends social media platforms for her bakery in Fort Worth. But the thing really taking up all of my time are my two internships in Dallas: D Magazine and Strauss Marketing and PR. You may be asking yourself, ‘how does she do it?’ Lots of blocking things out. I probably have a form of PTSD, but I mean, what are your 20s for if not a little trauma?

So as you can see, I’ve been really grateful for this little siesta from the fiesta that is my life. I’m spending the day working on projects at home will watching my dog (below) nervously bark at the birds outside. My boyfriend is in the other room playing video games and I couldn’t ask for a better Wednesday.