Erik Harp's Blog

 We are now nearing the end of the internship experience, and I have strongly valued the insights I have gained as part of the program. I've created a very detailed contact list including socials, contact information, and descriptions of 30+ organizations separated into three categories: potential attendees, panelists, and sponsors. I'm working with my partner to incorporate this into the marketing guide as a permanent resource for RXA to use when promoting their A2.AI conference in the future, while also as a sort of "relationship guide" to make sure that they are involved with other local companies. Additionally, I have been working on video editing while creating minute long highlight videos for social posts: there is a bit of a learning curve, but I am now getting familiar with keyframing and masking when animating intros to videos.  I've picked up some great advice this week, as I am beginning to reach the end of this internship and am looking forward to star...

 During this week of the Digital Summer Clinic, I worked mainly on creating digital content for social media campaigns and creating detailed contact lists for the conference hosted by RXA. For the digital content, I worked on creating minute long videos edited down from the "round-table" discussions from the last A2.AI conference. These were edited with music and plenty of cuts to highlight informative conversations that support the idea that implementing AI into business functions is the best route to improve business operations. This will help enlighten audiences into the services RXA offers, as well as display the sorts of things discussed during the A2.AI conference.  For the contact list, I have been scouring different resources, mainly connections to Ann Arbors A2 Tech 360 event, in order to create a comprehensive list of potential attendees, panelists, and even sponsors for the A2.AI conference. This includes descriptions and contact emails for each organization, organ...

This week in the Summer Clinic was a productive one. The meetings with the mentors were incredibly informative, and the goals of my partner and I's project with our company are becoming much more clear. The mentor meeting with Eric W. of Google and Jorel M. of Pinterest shared a lot of insight into succeeding in not only a digital world, but any work environment. We learned how to combat "imposter syndrome" by acknowledging how we feel, but striving to learn and improve. Additionally, we learned how important hustling and being genuine/sociable is to succeeding, especially when starting out in a business. It's important not to work with people on strictly a transactional basis, but to build relationships that can develop your  path in the long run (which I believe is a strong leadership skill in any position). One of the most important lessons I took from this meeting was a thought Eric shared: when you work somewhere for 20 years, you don't necessarily have 20 y...