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Internship Wrap-Up

Overall, I had such and awesome experience with American Dairy Association Mideast and I am so fortunate to have spent my summer with them. Jenny, Allison and Erin were really great to work with. We had a lot of fun together and I learned so much from them. They were very patient with my and taught me so much, They were always willing to help when I was stuck on a project, whether it was a technical problem with the software or a creativity block. I had taken a couple of classes before the internship that touched on the basics of the Adobe programs but it could never compare to what I learned in just my short time with ADA.

Additionally, everyone else in the office was great to work with! They were all so friendly and inviting the entire time I was there. I truly so thankful that I had the opportunity to work with such a great company and learn so much!

Week 14

It’s the last week of my internship and I am so sad! It went by way too quickly. I spent Monday and Tuesday working on my intern project video about our farm tours. The girls also took me out to lunch on Tuesday. On Wednesday, Erin and I drove up to Bucyrus, OH to interview a family that dairy farms in Crawford County. This was really fun and interesting because the farm is basically being ran by three very young boys. The oldest was 23 years old! They do more than just dairy farming too. The oldest son does all of the crop farming for the dairy. The middle essentially runs the dairy himself and he does various research trials on his animals to help him keep improving. The youngest son has his on fruits and vegetable business and sells all of his products from their families produce stand in Bucyrus. I was amazed that being so young, they were so smart about the business. It was really fun getting to know them and interview them. I also got some really cool photographs of the farm and the family that will be used for the featured farmer write-up on the ADA website.

Week 13

With the fair being over, it finally felt like we could take a break! I spent a majority of this week working on the serving size tear pad for Karen. This proved to be one of the most difficult projects of my internship because I required a lot of back and forth with Karen, making sure all of my information was right and that it still looked nice. The biggest challenge was the fact that I had to pack SO much information into a very small size while still making it look nice. I was very happy with how it turned out and Karen told me that she’s already gotten requests to have it blown up as a large poster. We spent the latter part of this week cleaning up the Dairy Products Building and tearing down all of the TV’s. I can’t believe how fast the fair went by and how fast my internship has gone by. Only one week left!

Weeks 11 and 12

It’s fair time! On Monday, we finished up any last minute projects that needed to be done for the fair. I was also given a project to work with our on staff nutritionist, Karen Bakies, to create a servings size guide for her to make tear pads to give to her dietetic students.

On Tuesday, we had the butter sculpture unveiling. For this event, we hosted a group of people to watch as we unveiled the sculpture for the first time. I was put in charge of our Facebook Live event. After the unveiling, we offered some free ice cream with our special fair flavor and milkshakes.

On Wednesday, the fair began. My job for the next week and a half was to stand at our exhibit in the Ohio Veterinary Medical Association building. Our exhibit was right next to the Milk-A-Cow station where there was a lot of foot traffic and a lot of opportunities to talk to consumers. I really enjoyed my time at the fair because I really like talking to people… and I talked to A LOT of people. Some were dairy farmers that I was able to have fun conversations about dairying with and other knew nothing about dairy, which was still really enjoyable because I was able to answer and questions they had about the industry.

During the fair, I was also able to join in at the Ohio Ag Hall of Fame breakfast where I made omelets for attendees. This was a really fun networking event for me, because I was able to meet a lot of new people in the industry.

Week 10

This week was busy! Monday was a really fun day as we spent it handing out Ice Cream to random people in the Arena District in Columbus. Our national board started a campaign called “Scoop it Forward” which encourages people to buy someone else some ice cream because who doesn’t love supporting dairy farmers and eating a delicious ice cream treat? We hired a group of filmmakers to come out with us so that we could promote the campaign more on social media.

#ScoopItForward 2018

On behalf of Ohio’s 2,200 dairy farm families, the American Dairy Association Mideast team hit the streets of downtown Columbus to pass out free Velvet Ice Cream in celebration of National Ice Cream Month! You can help #ScoopItForward, too. Show appreciation of others with random acts of kindness – or in this case, ice cream! Give ice cream to friends or family, or buy it for the next person in line at the ice cream shop.

Posted by American Dairy Association Mideast on Tuesday, July 17, 2018

 

The Ohio State Fair starts next week and there’s still plenty to do. I spent the beginning of the week working on butter sculpture signage. I use Illustrator to create the signs inside the cooler that described who the artists were and what the theme was this year. This took some serious creativity because the theme of the butter cow and calf is A Christmas Story movie. Now, since we’re in the middle of July, I wasn’t totally in my Christmas spirit so coming up with something “Christmasy” was a small challenge but I eventually came up with the idea of making gift tags on the signs with a pretty Christmas background.  The butter sculptor liked the signs so much that she asked to take them home after the fair was over!

This week I also had to work on A-Frame signs to display around the area in which I would be standing during the state fair. The A-Frames had to have some fun dairy facts on them. Because we’ve been using the Undeniably Dairy campaign within a lot of our projects, I stayed within that theme.

On Friday, I had to go down the fairgrounds to give a tutorial to those working in the Dairy Products Building on how to use the new menu boards and TV’s. I printed out a list for steps for them and then showed them on my computer how do it. I then allowed them to try doing it on their own, just in case I wouldn’t be around to fix an issue if it were arise.

Week 9

Every year for the Ohio State Fair, American Dairy Association Mideast unveils it’s famous butter cow. This year I got be apart of that and I was so excited! We spent the first few days of this week at the fairgrounds checking up on the butter display and getting things set up and ready to go for the fair. On Wednesday, I had to hook up all the TV’s to the Firesticks to get them running. Once all the menu boards were up and running, we left for lunch really quickly. When we came back, we found that one of the menu boards turned off on it’s own. After playing with the TV and the firestick, we couldn’t figure out why it kept shutting off. This was a big issue because we wanted to make sure that in the midst of the craziness during the fair, we wouldn’t have these technical issues. We finally decided to buy another firestick to see if it could be the solution to our problem and sure enough, it was! We got all the menus working and they stayed on the entire time. That was a relief. We spent most of our days this measuring walls for signs and coming up with new ideas for signage in the building. Also, the mural is coming together nicely!

Week 8

This week was cut pretty short because I was given a day off to make up for the Saturday that I was at the Jersey Convention and it was the Fourth if July. I spent most of Tuesday working on a fun graphic for us to post for the holiday. This was somewhat challenging creatively because I wanted to try to do something new a fresh but was having a difficult time getting creative. If it’s anything that I’ve learned this far into my internship it’s that sometimes ideas definitely do not some to you right a way and that’s okay. Eventually, I settled on a cartoon cow graphic with some Fourth of July flare to it, I was happy iwht the end result. On Thursday and Friday I was tasked with coming up with a new way to project the menu board in our Dairy Products Building at the Ohio State Fair. Before, they were using and huge computer that was difficult to transport and was really lacking creative freedom. I began looking into ScreenCloud.com, which is a digital signage service. I ran into a few issues with this task however because I also for that there wasn’t much creative freedom on the program that i’d like. After trying and failing several times to create a menu board that was both legible and graphically pleasing, I was felt pretty defeated. But the more I looked into different programs I finally found one that–albeit was difficult to use at first–ended up being great! I was able to design the menu boards however I chose and it worked with the ScreenCloud program to display it on the TV’s that would hang in the building. Once the menus were designed. My next task was figure out how to connect them to the TV’s. Through the research, I found that it would work through using Amazon Firesticks. we ordered 5 Firesticks and I had to go to through and program them all to make sure they were set up and that they would in fact work during the fair.

Week 7

I spent the first day of this week working on an ad for the Ohio Agriculture Hall of Fame breakfast booklet. Every year at the state fair, there are new inductees into the Ohio Agriculture Hall of Fame and there a breakfast held that honors the inductees and their accomplishments. Every year, ADA sponsors the event with an ad in their breakfast booklet that is handed out to those who join. I was given the ad from last year and was told that I could either keep the same format with just some updates or start form scratch. I decided to take on the challenge of starting from scratch. It took me a couple of tries before I found a design that I really liked. Eventually I came to a collage of Ohio dairy farmers with a message congratulating the inductees and some information regarding ADA. I cant wait to see it in print! Early Friday morning, Jenny Hubble and I left Columbus and headed to Canton in Northeast Ohio. We were heading to the Fuel Up to Play 60 event that was a part of the National Jersey Convention that was also held in Canton. Fuel Up to Play 60 is a program that is partnered with dairy associations and the NFL to encourage kids to live healthier lives by exercising at least 60 minutes a day and replenishing that effort with delicious dairy drinks and snacks. For this event, we had two former NFL players, Jamal White and Lomar Brown, join us. My job for the day was to take photos of the kids playing with the NFL players and getting “professional shots” for those who participated. I had so much fun at this event. The NFL players were very nice and did a great job working with the kids. They were also great sports while standing and taking photos in the heat for so long… I even snagged a photo for myself! After the event, we headed back to the hotel to rest up for the Jersey Convention banquet that night. Our CEO, Scott Higgins gave a presentation at the banquet that talked about American Dairy Association Mideast and what we do. The following morning I was able to watch Jenny give a presentation about how to effectively use social media as dairy farmers to help promote our industry. This was a great learning experience for me because I learned a lot about the do’s and dont’s of social media, plus I learned quite a bit about how to give a good presentation by watching Jenny. Overall, it was a really great weekend!

Week 5

With June Dairy Month in full swing, we kept ourselves very busy. I spent most of the beginning of this week preparing and scheduling social media posts on our various accounts. We had  a team meeting on Thursday to prepare us for our Twitter party that we were hosting through the ADA twitter account. The purpose of this Twitter party was to get people involved in some talk about June Dairy Month and just dairy industry in general. For this event, I was in charge of liking tweets to ensure that our tweet coordinator could see any questions that were being asked and could respond to any important questions. This was much crazier than I expected it to be. We had a lot of people tune in to the twitter party and it was quite literally the fastest hour of my life because the tweets never stopped! A majority of the people interacting were non-farming people. So, it was really cool to see so many people interested in and supporting the dairy industry. During this week, we also made a trip to the Ohio State fair grounds to measure a wall alongside the Dairy Products Building for a mural. This year, Dairy Management Inc. is starting a movement to paint murals dedicated to dairy. This is happening all over, from California to New York. I am so excited to see the mural when it’s done!

Week 4

It’s week 4 and June Dairy Month! We kicked off JDM with a Golf Outing that was hosted by Ohio Dairy Producers Association (ODPA). ODPA is an organization that works on behalf of Ohio’s dairy farmers in the political arena. I spent most of the week preparing for the gold outing by creating signs for the gold carts and making flyers to hand out during. The outing was held on Friday, June 1st and it was was a fundraiser to go towards ODPA’s efforts. The outing was held on World Milk Day at the OSU-ATI golf course in Wooster, OH. People who played included industry people as well as local dairy farmers. I really enjoyed this event because I got to meet new people in the industry. Side note: the most interesting person I met was gentleman who grew in California just in the next town over from mine, small world! After checking in players, I was able to drive around the golf course to snap photos of the players and offer beverages and snacks. At the end of the game, everyone came in for lunch and awards were announced. ODPA CEO, Scott Higgins made a speech and thanked everyone for joining us that day. All-in-all, the event turned out very nice and everyone had a great time.