Humanities Internship Spotlight
Mason Ressler | Ava Jemison | Jin Yoo
Humanities students gain valuable, career-ready skills through their coursework and co-curricular programs. Internships offer an essential opportunity to apply these skills in real-world settings, explore potential career paths, and gain professional experience. For many students, completing an internship is a key step in successfully transitioning from college to the workplace.
One of the things that drew me to this internship is my interest in men’s fashion and design. Growing up, I was always interested in combining different colors, brands, and styles together, so to be able to work on clothing design in a professional setting was a dream come true. The most significant way that my internship connected to my major in Communication was when I was tasked with working on a larger team. It showed me how much dialogue, decision-making, and how many team meetings go into every decision at a company like Fabletics. It also demonstrated the importance of having good communication in team leaders all the way down to the interns.
One specific project that I was assigned during my internship was creating my own college branded merchandise for a possible Fabletics collaboration. I had to design clothing using AI, brainstorm possible brand collaborations, and market the merchandise at a meeting with some of the executives. I chose the University of Utah as my school, and pitched a possible brand collaboration with Liquid Death, the canned water company. My ideas were to combine some of the University of Utah’s merchandise with Liquid Death pop-ups to showcase both the university and Fabletics side-by-side. My internship helped me learn more about how crucial daily communication is for large projects. Always asking my mentor for guidance, giving them updates on my project, and collaborating with my teammates meant that communication was at the core of everything I did at Fabletics.
Over the summer, I interned with the U.S. Ski Team’s marketing and communications department. Although I have been a ski racer on the team for the past four years, that was my first time getting to see what goes on behind the scenes. I helped manage social media engagement, using my creativity to produce content and support the team’s brand growth. Most days, after my own workouts, I’d film TikToks and Instagram posts, asking athletes fun “question of the day” prompts or highlighting their summer training. I also contributed to side projects like our X Games collaboration and helped coordinate sponsored content with companies working with the team.
My internship gave me real-world experience in marketing and helped me understand how powerful storytelling and social media are when it comes to building a brand. It directly connects to my major in Strategic Communication, especially when it comes to creating content for a specific audience and analyzing results to improve future outreach. Working with such a large, established brand gave me more confidence in my ability to contribute to marketing teams in the future.
One thing I really appreciated was how the internship aligned with both of my passions: skiing and marketing. I’d encourage other students to think creatively when looking for internships. It never occurred to me that I could combine both areas of my life until I started asking people within the team if there were opportunities. That simple outreach led to an experience that worked with my schedule as a pro athlete, and helped me build valuable career skills at the same time.
I was always interested in working with artificial intelligence (AI) to learn about programming and prompt engineering. Rather than learning from the basic concepts, I directly stepped into working in prompt tuning, which involved many hours of studying by myself and practice to get familiar with Jupyter and the grok3 mechanism. I was able to attend meetings, talk with my supervisors to solve problems, and present my project in front of senior leadership. There were many obstacles during my internship. On the third day of my first week, I was so obsessed with working hard that I skipped all my breaks and eventually suffered a serious headache. Since then, I've learned that a bit of a break and coffee are really important since we are not robots.
My ultimate career dream is to be a news anchor and journalist. I have always wanted to cover news stories that are different from AI-generated ones by avoiding dry tones and seeking information from the people about where I should conduct in-person interviews. In order to do it, I must know about AI and how it operates to gather sources of information and generate news. During my internship, I had the chance to improve AI prompts based on error patterns and iterate to enhance their model accuracy. I believe that AI journalism was developed and is advancing in a similar way. It requires AI output evaluation and prompt optimization to better write the proper and qualified news articles, which was my main work during my internship. Just like Steve Jobs said, “all dots are somehow connected.” I recommend that other students be brave when seeking an internship, rather than being selective, try to be open to embracing all work.