Have you ever come up with an idea and then thought to yourself: “This is either an awesomely great idea or a terribly bad one”?
I had one of those ideas recently: to start an internship for my newly created publishing company.
Why would I want to do that? The short answer is I don’t have time to do a lot of the things necessary to run an author platform (i.e. posting regularly on social media). So I could use the extra help.
Also, the high school I teach at in Nicaragua has an internship program where kids get to work on the school’s computer system. When I saw that there were students willing to spend hours of their summer break at school opening up computers and fiddling with wires, I thought, “Would they be interested in working for me?”
The Internship
The idea is for them to help me out by creating content on social media and building up the brand awareness side of my author platform.
Doing an assessment, I figured this could either be really great or really terrible. On one hand, this would give students experience in marketing research and graphic design (not something readily available here to high schoolers in Nicaragua). But on the other hand, this internship could be seen as my using Nicaraguan children for free labor to build up my ego–*ahem* I mean brand. 😨
I asked around to see what the school director and my fellow teachers thought. They all said it sounded like a great opportunity. But what about the students? What would they think? I mean, they’d be the ones who’d be doing the work, so their opinion mattered the most.
So I made an announcement in my classes that I’d be having a lunch meeting to speak on what the internship was all about. Would anyone show up? Here was the big test to see if my idea would sink or swim.
The Meeting
When lunchtime rolled around, I was surprised to see that most of my classroom was full of students! (And there were some who couldn’t make it because of prior engagements who told me later on that they were interested.) Most students signed up, asking to be a part of my team.
The verdict was in: internship = a good idea.
Now I have a team of awesome students who are excited to use their creativity in graphic design and learn more about the advertising world. I can’t wait to see what they come up with.
Have you ever had an idea that you thought might not work but it ended up working great? Please share in the comments.