Clara Flesher, Junior English Major, shares about their internship with Poputchik LLC
“Hello! I’m Clara Flesher, a rising junior and an English major. This summer, I have been working as a production intern for Poputchik LLC, a podcast production company that focuses on talking about mental health in a more approachable way to facilitate open and honest conversations about mental health. Poputchik LLC partners with the Maximum Fun Network to make two podcasts and teams up with the National Alliance on Mental Illness for a third podcast.
When creating this internship, I was particularly interested in understanding the entire process of taking an idea from its beginning to its final product. Because of this, the work I do covers a wide range of aspects of the process. Once a week, I find a handful of recent articles about mental health, pull a few quotes from each of them, and write up a quick summary about what they cover and why they are important. This all then goes into the weekly newsletter, which accompanies one of the podcasts. I also spend some time thinking of and researching potential guests for the podcasts, who I then pitch in the production meeting. After this, I will reach out to the guest’s representatives, pitching the show and inviting the guest to the show. If they agree, I schedule a time to record the episode over Zoom. In the meantime, I will do more research about the guest so that we can ask them productive questions. Then I will sit in on the interview and contribute any questions that I think should be asked of the guest. After the producer does the first pass of the edit, I might listen to the cut to help with any more editing choices. Occasionally I will write up what I think the episode is about more broadly, which helps inform the framing used in the web copy. I also helped write a few web copies here and there as well. This internship has mostly been remote, but that hasn’t prevented me from getting to know the people with whom I work. I feel lucky to be able to see so many aspects of the job, and I have been appreciative that everyone I’m working with is so generous with sharing their time and expertise.
The internship is well underway at this point, but I’m still learning new things every day. I have enjoyed how varied the work has been and all the different things I have had the chance to learn. By the end of the summer, I feel I will have had an experience that will help me enter this field and skills that would be valuable in any profession.”