NACE Career-Ready Competencies (Summer 2025)

Teamwork: Last semester, 3 other interns worked on a project to showcase the various internships we have at Jefferson Lab. This summer, we completed the project by posting videos highlighting a few of the students we interviewed. This project required us to all put our skills and knowledge together for a deliverable that is beneficial to the image of the lab. Teamwork is an important skill in the workplace, particularly on projects that require multiple skill sets. This is one that I plan on developing as I continue my career in social media. Here is a link to one of the videos we created!

Technology: As I mentioned last semester, artificial intelligence is a tool that is being used increasingly more at Jefferson Lab, including in our communications office. One of my tasks this summer was to create posts resharing old Jefferson Lab YouTube videos. One of the challenges of this was gathering high-quality images from these videos to post. In response, I used AI to generate high-quality images such as this butterfly post. With AI becoming an important tool in media, I plan on continuing to find ways to integrate this in my workflow so I can list this as a skill for future jobs.

Critical thinking: Critical thinking was an important part of interning this summer. One instance that required me to use this is the Day in the Life of an intern video with Gracie Burrows. Gracie was one of 40 summer science interns, and we needed a quick, engaging video to highlight one of these interns. I decided to do a day in the life video as these are very popular on social media. The problem was that it would be difficult to follow her around all day with a camera. In response, I gave her a broad range of shot ideas and expectations to film on her own, and I edited the footage to make what she sent me seem very interesting. The video ended up as Jefferson Lab’s best-performing video of all time! This has prepared me for my career, as social media often requires a lot of impromptu decisions and thinking outside the box to develop the best possible video. Here is a link to the video on Instagram!