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For Alyson Shumeyko ’14 (Vestal, N.Y.), every day at Viacom brought a surprise.
One morning during her summer internship at its NickMom division, she walked in to discover the office was live streaming the O Music Awards from the building all day. Why? Because in the neighboring Oakley Store, drummer Andrew W.K. was drumming for 24 hours straight, earning an award for breaking the world record.
Alyson Shumeyko ’14 overlooks Time Square with Sponge Bob Square Pants.
More importantly, Shumeyko, a double major in English and film and media studies, gained valuable job experience as an editorial intern at NickMom, the parent-focused comedy sector of Nickelodeon. She worked primarily with the department’s websites, NickMom.com and ParentsConnect.com. For ParentsConnect, she helped create weekly content such as “love it or leave it” polls, recipe slideshows, biweekly newsletters, and collections of parent-related articles.
“In this process, I used my writing skills to create little blurbs and descriptions for each project and also pick up elementary computer programming skills as I learned each new program that we used,” she explains. “For NickMom, each week I kept track of our followers’ tweets and selected a batch of them that I thought our audience would find particularly humorous to be highlighted on the website.”
Shumeyko also attended meetings about priorities and ideas, brainstorming events with others as they borrowed from their own life mishaps to develop content for funny and relevant pieces.
“I loved the brainstorming process and getting to experience the magic first hand,” she says. “I also loved that I was not only encouraged to participate in these meetings, I was expected to!”
According to Shumeyko, in addition to being a great learning experience, the internship was a valuable networking opportunity.
“The College Relations team at Viacom offered various events for meeting people within specific fields and I was privileged enough to be selected to sit in on a round table discussion with COO Tom Dooley,” she says.
She learned about the internship through Lafayette Career Services and also received a helping hand from Viacom executive Peter Lops ’91.
“Overall, this internship helped me to find and articulate what I do and do not want in a job after graduation and it gave me the networking resources to hopefully find such a job when I graduate,” she says. “While I’m still not positive what I ultimately want to do, I know that I want to work within the entertainment industry.”