Even within the highly defined area of marketing and advertising internships there are still many potential avenues for your internship to go down. You will want to determine if you are interested in the client side or agency side for starters.
If you decide to go down the agency side you may get the chance to do a lot of different work on for a lot of different companies. The advantage here is obviously the variety and large range of skills you will get to see used by the internship supervisor and even learn of your own. Working in an agency setting means you will most likely be involved on some level of creative work, even if it is just helping with the research the advertising agency needs done to better understand their clients’ needs.
The client side gives you the chance to see how an in-house marketing department works. In-house marketing departments work in a variety of ways. Some have no outside dependence on advertising or other marketing related agencies like PR firms or design studios. Meanwhile other in house marketing departments spend more time focusing on strategy and research and consequently farm out much of their creative needs to advertising and web design agencies. Doing an internship in this setting will let you see how marketing departments interact with the upper management of a company and give you a closer look at how a marketing professional marries business and marketing strategy.
Whichever path your marketing and advertising internship goes you will learn so much more than just a classroom setting can provide.
