Final Revolution

It feels very uncomfortable that my internship is almost over. I cannot imagine my life without coming to the 1776 office early in the mornings or late at evenings and staying there after my shift to complete my homework. More than half of year I have been attached to this place.

Time to reflect on my experience at 1776.

I cannot say less that it was amazing experience. From my first day there, 1776 team made me feel so comfortable as part of the team from my direct supervisor to CEOs of the company. The resources they provided were extremely interesting and useful. Starting from organizational skills, teaching me how to write contracts, operating A/V system to introducing to the most influential people in Washington D.C. in the startup community and to experience innovative disruptive technologies firsthand.

It was not an easy challenge. The work was quite often challenging and demanding,but always rewarding.

I still have my final project to present for 1776 team. The project is to create my own event from scratch. I will write about it in my next post.

So, I hope to be back to 1776 soon, but at another position.

Revolutionary events

In this post I'll describe what event intern does at 1776.

Half of my time, I am assisting at the events. I meet with clients, go over day-of-event logistics, help with setup, run A/V system, sometimes assist with guests registration, Q&A sessions or sales. After I help with closing the venue.

The other part is. I review application for event hosting. 1776 is very selective as it wants to make sure that all events are beneficial for its community. Assist my supervisor with contracting and getting details. We also work closely with our building management so we have to report on our events, when we want extended security, after hours air conditioning and elevators' working hours. I am also in charge of updating public calendar on 1776's official website. 

My favorite part is research. It is the most challenging. The task varies from creating titles for events, looking for potential participants and speakers, search for venue improvements and identifying potential partners. 

Revolutionize my career

So far I applied for internship twice, I had two internships. Using simple math, I like that ratio. 

It does not mean necessarily that I liked my internships. I mean, I liked them as experience, but now I know what I do not want to do in the future.

My first internship was at the American-Russian Cultural Cooperation Foundation. It is very small NGO dedicate to promote cultural understanding between people of the United States and Russia. It was extremely interesting, I met amazing people, I worked with the Russian Embassy, the Library of Congress,  world renowned artist like Wynton Marsalis and Valeriy Gergiev. 

The issue was that it was an extremely small NGO. There were three members of the team, including me. We did have several people helping outside of the office, but they helped based on issue. My assignments were research, phone calls, speechwriting, pitching and brainstorming. However, during any of my task, I had to remember that the organization is fully dependent on sponsors and donors and there is also an office to keep working through the creating process. I had to count sponsors' interest and to get approval of 20 different people who were not very involved in the process, but had lots of requests. The cycle locked within these people making my work not very productive. 

1776, my current internship was thematically not related to me. It is startup incubator that assist startups working in 4 high-regulated field like energy, health, education and "smart cities" (mixed of government administration, transportation, urban lifestyle). I had no idea about startups or any of these 4 themes. I spent and spend time every week to observe how they work. After several months I concluded for myself that I'm not interested in taking business. 

Through my short but colorful journey through internships, I am now aiming to work at public sector. Since I'm Russian citizen, it means working at public sector in Russia.

Career development session at 1776

One sunny day 1776 decided too invest in interns and organized career development session for interns.

This session was hosted by one of the member of 1776, Mrim Boutla, co- founder of the More Than Money careers.

More Than Money or MTM is a platform dedicated to empowering students who seek to pursue careers than are fulfilling beyond just paychecks.

Mrim talked to us about what career path we can follow and how to mix your passions and career. We discussed several options we have. Later she graciously provided us with access to her platform and helped us set up our profiles.

The platform requires several tests to be completed to get our personality and career profile. After that it suggested several matches for our possible professions and positions matching our motivation and skill sets.

The next step was extremely useful. The platform suggests where and how to find connections, how to recruit mentors or learn about current trends in our field.

Lastly, the platforms opens the world of hidden jobs from Twitter by finding relevant people and tweets.

That was great self-exploration session. If you're interested, check out http://www.mtmc.co/

How I got an internship at 1776

1776 is pretty popular workplace in our city. And not an easy one to get into.

I first learned about 1776, when my professor brought my Social Media class there. I was amazed by it. It does have unique environment, it looks inspirational and people are interesting.

Soon after this class, I saw my friend's post on Facebook about availability of internships there. I decided to give it a try. My previous internship had to do a lot with event management, so I applied for two positions of media intern and event management intern. I spent the night trying to find any connections at 1776 to ask about requirements and to help me to stand out from the huge pool of applicants. And I did succeeded in it. After two rounds of interviews, I was offered a position of summer interns.

The issue I had that as I'm an international student on student visa, I had to go home during the summer to renew my visa and I didn't know how long it would take (2 weeks or 2 months). I decided to say about this right away during my interview to avoid any future complications. I was open about this and it didn't hurt me at all.

When the summer was close to an end, I was offered to stay for the fall semester. Why not?

Reception duty during Revolutions

All interns at 1776 are also campus ambassadors. They call its office collaborative space campus, because it is campus. People work together or separately, eat and sleep, have fun and study, and of course, work. By the way, there were 21 interns this semester. 

So, besides the work inters do within their department there are campus duties: kitchen and reception desk. Kitchen duty is nothing glamorous. The interns have to restock fridge with sodas, coffee bar with coffee and sugar, PBJ station with PBJ, obviously. The issue is that there are two kitchens, so it takes quite some time. 

Reception desk duty is pretty obvious too. You seat at the reception desk, meet and greet guests, notify members of 1776 that they have guests, sort through and deliver tons of mail and packages. Nothing thrilling, but I like it. I like it a lot.

First of all I have never had experience in customer relations. So it was my area to practice. I got to learn how office space operates from within. It was especially beneficial for me because I was not familiar with how mail operates in the United States and just in general learning typical routine. 

Secondly, honestly, I had fear of phone call and talking to unknown to me people. But being at reception, when I had no choice but answer the phone calls and talking to hundred new people every day helped to overcome my fears.

Lesson: don't complain at trying things you are thinking you are not going to like, because you might end up liking them. 

Brainstorming the name for Revolutions

One of the most interesting assignment I had at 1776 was brainstorming and researching possible names for events. Since I have signed NDA, I cannot disclose information not about the events nor the names.

The process in reality is not that fun. After several hours of brainstorming we had more than 40 entries in the Google Doc. Next step was to research on the use of that names. It appeared that people around the world just as creative as our small team because majority of names have been used previously. Also, during the research stage I added about 20 more titles. Next step was finding the owner of the words and reaching out to them to ensure there is no copyright infringement.

By the way, after spending more than week on that, the team picked up the very first candidate. 

Revolution in my network

One of the important part of my internship routine was researching and recruiting people on LinkedIn.

I took class on social media previously, so I felt pretty comfortable using LinkedIn and I was satisfied with my profile. But I guess the majority of people had no idea why I was checking out their profiles, because almost everyone checked my profile back.

One morning, next day after my research day at 1776, I opened my LinkedIn and saw two numbers: 72 and 1. I had 72 visits to my profile. Such a great endorsement for my public presence online.

Well, the magical number was actually 1. I have received 1 message. It was message from one of the manager of new HR company in Washington D.C. and contained job offer. JOB OFFER! I was thrilled.

Despite my excitement, I had to refuse this offer for two reasons: it is event management position, that I'm not interested anymore; and I still have to complete my education first.

I will use LinkedIn for my future job hunt.

Revolution after hours

It's time to talk about something negatives.

As any job or internship, my internship has some drawbacks. 

The first issue I faced was hours I had to work. During summer I was more flexible, but with arrival of the fall, the issue came up. More events and more classes put me in difficult situation. Since I am event intern, I had to do a lot of late nights and sometimes weekends. And I was not the only one in my team to  experience that issue. So pretty soon everyone started to cut down hours. That led to be very understaffed during the events. I was still trying to complete all my shifts for a while, but later I asked to cut down my hours too. The best we could do is to reduce of for two hours. Not much, but something.

This semester happened to be extremely tough for me: 6 classes, internship, Russian club at school, GRE preparation, grad school application, then I had unexpected bad stomach flu and some health issues, my laptop collapsed with my major paper not being saved. As the result I am very stressed and behind plenty of my work. I guess my bed can wait till winter break. 

See you soon, night dreams!

Revolutions at 1776 - My internship

So, as public communication student, I joined 1776 Team to enrich my skills. 1776 is a unique place with unique environment. It is a startup incubator right in the heart of Washington, D.C ( actually across the street from the Washington Post). It has amazing collaborative workspace where people gather together everyday and working next to each other. I will write more on the environment in one of the next posts, for now I will tell you how I caught myself here. Last semester I took Social Media Strategy and Tactics class at American University (and my first two posts actually were assignments for this class). One day, our professor held class at 1776. Being impressed with space, I focused my eyes to any mentions of 1776 and one day I saw my friend's post about available internship positions. I applied for two: pr and event departments. PR is my major, and event management was my previous internship. After standard process of sending resume, cover letters and interviews, my first day at 1776 arrived. I started in June. Originally, I was supposed to intern till the end of summer, but then opportunity to do the fall internship appeared and I decided to go for it. So, I've been interning at 1776 for four months already, and they were amazing months full of great people and interesting events, challenging task and pleasurable outcomes. More reflections of my internship to come soon...

Dilemmas of existentialism online and offline

If I communicate, I exist; If I communicate, I don't have time to exist...

Slide to stop alarm.  Tap to snooze. 12 notifications, missed call, 3 SMS. 6:00 am. Then I wake up. 

Next, I get Facetime call from my mom. Then Skype reminds me that it is my cousin’s birthday.

Then there is an annoying notification circle indicating the number of missed friend's activity on social media while I was sleeping on Facebook, Twitter, E-mail, Vk, Viber, Whatsapp, Instagram, Snapchat and LinkedIn. And I have to check them all I really feel like I have to. Because if I don’t I will feel like I'm ignoring part of my social life. Or at least those red circles look really annoying to me. Next hour I spend reading all news on various newsfeeds, because it won’t be possible to catch up later. Ant then I can't show up in public space without knowing the latest news. It's D.C. 

I try to be productive, I really do. I manage to avoid my IPhone for several hours during classes or work. Still, I compensate those hours later. Someone calls it procrastination. I call it   

Basically, taking out small details of life, the day looks like this:

Yeah, does not look very entertaining.  Being human being involves little bit more than this. But what? Why the life now imprisoned in social media? What is social media?

LIFE DILEMMA: 

Checking social networks and media hundreds times a day or one time but for hours actually occupy a huge portion of time in day. Not only time is dedicated to social media, but also attention.

I used to block social networks when studying, but now, I simply cannot afford it. Multiple group projects I'm involved communicate via Facebook messenger, my classes do logistics in Facebook groups, my boss sends me works on Facebook. I tweet for my class; I look for job on LinkedIn. Moreover, when Facebook is blocked, I cannot login in hundreds of websites since I signed up with my Facebook account.

I have a Zero policy for myself  - the inbox and notifications should be as close as possible to zero before I go to bed. It helps me not to forget important communication and also sort crap from actual content. Still, give me 25^th hour to finish up social media responses.

SOCIAL MEDIA DILEMMA:

Checking social networks and media hundreds times a day or one time but for hours supposed to bring some results or products, but what are they? So what is Facebook now? What will be its purpose in a year, 2, 5, 10. Mindlessly scrolling through posts clicking through bizarre photo albums of cute or sarcastically smart images and  skimming updates from people in whose lives I barely interested and wondering why and how I end up reading these posts and liked them. Is it prodictive?

YES! I strongly believe and want to believe that social media have benefits. First of all, it is a learning process. With every page you get some of your brain memory occupied by new information. Second, it is social. I think that I’d never bother myself to remember half of my friends if not social media. Third, it accumulates social capital (academically saying it is expected benefits derived from contributing to the community). In social media in very primitive way it means when you comment and like posts of people, they will eventually help you with something or pay you back. Isn’t it great?

Enjoy your life and social media!

Fb.com vs Vk.com Battle of rights of copy

Disclaimer: During the process of creating this post none of illegal actions were committed. All scenes and stories are staged and are not based on true stories J

VKONTAKTE – THE RUSSIAN FACEBOOK
The website Vk.com, widely known as vkontakte.com (Russian for in-touch) is identical to Facebook in every way except one: no regard for copyright laws.

On Vkontakte you can find all kinds of pirated media and be shared for free with 110 million users.  Music? Check! New Movies? Got them! And everything is FREE!

With more than 110 million registered users, Vkontakte is the third most visited website in Russia and is used by more than half of Russia's online population, by far beating Facebook and other social media on the Russian market.

Basically it is Facebook for music and video with entire Facebook service as well. My own experience – vk.com is actually more user friendly than Facebook. But if you want higher level of officiality, timeliness, thrust, quality and decency (well, o vk.com anything can happen), then Facebook is your land. 

SONGS AND MUSIC
With millions of users uploading their favorite music and videos, today Vk.com is the huge, gigantic, enormous database. Long story short, I will go to vk.com to see new release or find music that I heard on radio or on school dances. Vkontakte has become a place where people can easily find and listen to just about any song ever recorded. There is sequel to the story: although the site itself doesn't have an option to download files, there are several apps and extensions for browsers that can magically transport this music to your device. Magic! Some lazy users just listen from vk.com as online player. The same storyline goes with movies. But since they are larger, vk.com became an online cinema as well.

COPYRIGHT AND PIRATES
I don’t remember what I agreed to when signed up for vk.com. (Honestly, I don’t think I read the conditions anyway).  But till the point of writing this post I was not very concerned about them. I never uploaded any content that is not created by me. But I did shared and downloaded to my playlists. Am I bad guy now? How I was supposed to know that those songs belonged to someone else, if they are on public website. I don’t have time to check every single song. I refuse to wear pirate hat (well, maybe a parrot on the shoulder would be cool). My defense is that it is within the website and for my personal use, I am not distributing these anyway further. In addition, most of songs I found in vk.com are those that I cannot buy or even find while on American soil.  Social media is for social not for media. Probably. However it impossible to throw away an ice cream that you licked already.

Vkontakte has recently lost a copyright case to Gala Music Group who claimed their rights for the content posted by Vkontakte users, in this case - songs by Russian pop-musicians Maxim and Infinity. Vkontakte paid a compensation of 220,000 rubles ($7000) - a ridiculous amount considering the company's ample profits of almost $45 million in 2010*.


RUSSIAN SOUL AND AMERICAN DREAM
I totally understand that infringing copyright is bad, even dangerous. And also mean to artists. But in the backstage, is it really that bad???

I think it is fair competition with tons of streaming websites. What if I recorded the video on one very happy Russian New Year eve when my loud company was singing an extremely popular song and then couldn’t resist but to show off the talents? I guess the world would look nice from the cell.

On other side, owners of copyrights have their reasoning too: they actually want that their products were consumed as much as possible. It is a great promotion. You post your piece. You work to distribute it. People love it, share it and as result you got your business. I know few young artists who thank vk.com for their career. Reminds me of YouTube here. Btw, YouTube is very similar too. You can add the video to your own playlists and then enjoy it forever and ever.

On the other hand, the search for music in Vkontakte still shows hundreds of results by Maxim and Infinity.To be entirely honest -  Internet users with Russian soul do not consider downloading as stealing - after all, if they want a better experience or are willing to support the artist they can buy a song or video, go to a concert or a movie theater. Otherwise, why I have to pay for something I can get for free? In my communication class I’ve learned that everything I do within the website system using option they provide is legal (“share” and be safe).

So, check out my Vine summary of the post:


And if you want get a little bit more of Russian soul, check out Maxim's video Enjoy!