Interning at the Kay Yow Cancer Fund was everything and so much more than what I expected.

Interning at the Fund was an interesting and inspiring experience for me, especially because it’s such a small organization and I was the first intern they ever had.

As communications and marketing intern, I was in charge of literally doing everything. There were only four people who managed the Fund and they were: Robin Pate, Director of Community Development; Sarah Reese, Operations Coordinator; Megan Smith, Director of Marketing & Development; and last but not least, Sue Donohoe, Executive Director.

Most of the job I got assigned came from Megan. Every week she would have social media projects for me to do. I drafted tweets, Facebook statutes and came up with new ideas and Twitter hash tags to promote the Fund with.  I even got the chance to develop a social media content analysis to see how many people the Fund reached on a monthly basis.

Other than working to improve the Fund’s social media, I was present at their events and helped them sell merchandise. The events were basketball events at NC State.

The Kay Yow Cancer Fund was started by Coach Kay Yow, a former NC State women’s basketball coach whose battle against cancer inspired many. NC State women’s basketball team still dedicates their games to the former Coach Yow and I was lucky enough to be present at the games where the Fund was of high importance to this community.

I would have to say the most entertaining part of working with the Fund was when I got to meet all the former basketball players who had known Kay Yow.

I also got a chance to see how my work inspired and touched people. All the events that we talked about and planned in our meetings during office hours, all the social media plans, were for people and families that had been affected with cancer. I was there to witness how I made a difference and that meant the world to me. I got the chance to interact with different kinds of people. I got to see how cancer affects people. I couldn’t help but think about my grandmother, who had passed away of colon cancer. I knew I was in the right place.

Other than being part of events and applying a lot of my writing skills, I also did “mindless things” as one of my supervisors, Sarah Reese, would call them. I folded hundreds and hundreds of letters and stuck them in envelopes. I sent hundreds of emails to events participants, coaches and donors. I made copies, countless copies. But I got the chance to be the community’s secondary contact and would get a lot of emails with questions. I learned to be more professional by answering people’s questions and being there to help.

But those “mindless things” taught me what work really was about. Drafting tweets and social media plans were just a set of the skills that I got to apply but folding envelopes really made me think about the goal of the Fund and the amount of people we were influencing. I was constantly reminded of the many people who were affected by cancer and that reminder made me want to do anything. If I had to fold 800 letters again, I would do it without hesitation.

On my first day at the Fund, I was asked to join the team at a staff meeting. It was five of us total and they would talk about next month’s events and each person would contribute something and then it would become the topic of conversation.

I would sit there with my pink pad, which I had bought in dedication to the Fund, and just listened. I wrote down the things they said. But then Sue Donohoe said to me “What do you think, Janice?” I was caught off guard. Not only because she had asked for my input, but because I had expected to just sit there and be invisible. I expected to just be assigned a job. It was from that day on that I felt like I was part of a team. I was part of meetings with one of their partners, NIKE, and was lucky enough to work with them and implemented their social media plan. I got the chance to work with Largemouth, their PR associates, to help implement the Fund’s PR plan.

Working with four different people who assigned me different tasks was an interesting yet crazy job. I was challenged in many different ways and sometimes there were things I didn’t know how to do. I learned to work with excel spreadsheets by creating social media content analyses. I even learned how to accurately fold letters, which, if you really think about it, takes a lot of skill. Sue would ask me to edit her letters to coaches. Megan would ask me for social media help. Robin would ask me to organize the merchandise. Sarah asked me to fold letters. They were all different jobs that I learned and grew in knowledge from.

Thanks to working with the Fund, I learned a new set of skills that I can apply in my future internships/jobs.

Thanks to the Fund, I realized that I wanted to keep making a difference and continue my goal to make a difference by working with non-profit organizations. So I applied for another internship in the summer with a non-profit in Morrisville, NC. I will be the events intern for Special Olympics North Carolina, where I will get the chance to work with children/adults with disabilities and have the chance to really make an impact in the community.

When my last day at the Fund comes in a few days, I will be sad but will always remember how great this experience was for me. I will always carry with me Coach Kay Yow’s words of wisdom.

“When life kicks you, let it kick you forward.”

Coach Kay Yow once said, “When life kicks you, let it kick you forward.” And I will always remember that. I will always carry that with me.

– JMRA