This week for the Internship Spotlight, The Etownian had the chance to catch up with junior professional writing major Anslee Gerhardt, who recently wrapped up her second in a series of internships this past December. Starting September of last semester, Gerhardt interned at Infantree, a branding agency based in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. After reaching out to student advisor and Associate Professor of English Dr. Tara Moore and Elizabethtown College’s Career Development Center in the spring of 2024, she was notified of the position and decided to take it.
“What drew me to Infantree was how small the company was,” Gerhardt said. “Typically, with other internships at bigger corporations, you do a lot of grunt work. But since Infantree was offering an internship, I knew they would care.”
According to the agency’s website, “[Infantree] would rather fight alongside the upstarts. The Davids squaring off against their giants[…] it’s in these pivotal moments that great branding can have the biggest impact.” With local, grassroots values like these, Gerhardt said she felt she had more passion to bring to the project and expressed appreciation for the community that it built in the workplace.
Gerhardt interned three days a week, two days in office and one remote day. During her time, she edited company wide announcement emails for corporate and commercial business clients, brainstormed branding ideas, wrote for client websites, wrote social media captions and wrote and edited two of the agency’s long-form blog posts. The process, as she explained, was more complex than one would think for branding, often involving synchronous collaboration with multiple graphic designers and artists.
“The collaboration allows me to see where blocks of text can go and how the words match the design,” Gerhardt said. “I also had them read things that I wrote, which was a refreshing perspective. The office space was also small enough to foster a collaborative atmosphere.”
Of the experience in the field, Gerhardt said she has walked away hopeful. Her first blog post featured interviews with those working at the agency.
“There were even more applications to my practice than I thought,” Gerhardt said, “We collaborated with the design team and I was very involved in the writing process from top-to-bottom throughout the semester. We never touched AI, not even once. This company wanted to care more about their clients and get real human ideas, which I appreciate.”
Given the rising trend of corporate AI use, claiming an available and reliable internship can be a fraught process.
“Everytime I met with Dr. Moore and asked a bunch of questions, she always told me, ‘All you have to do is talk.’ If you look at networking as just talking, it becomes way less intimidating,” she said.
When Gerhardt was first beginning to look at resume-building opportunities in her field, she was wary that she only had schoolwork to show, but it was enough.
“You have more examples of your experience and years of studying than you think,” she said.Currently, Gerhardt is jumping back into work and beginning a third internship with Clark Associates, a company she has worked with before. For those interested in internship opportunities, the Etown Career Development Center can be reached at careerdevelopmentcenter@etown.edu.
