My Experience at LYF

My internship at the Love Yourself Foundation was nothing short of transformative. For the Fall 2023 semester, I was their Content Writing and Editing Intern which meant I primarily worked with the Blog & Newsletter team. At the start of my internship, my main responsibilities were writing and editing blog posts about our monthly themes or our mission to sustainability and mental health and contributing to our member newsletter. Additionally, I was required to attend training focused on our team, organizational culture, and responsibilities as an intern. After training was over, I was required to attend team and intern meetings. However, at the end of my internship, these responsibilities became only one of many.

I am a person who is not happy with just doing the bare minimum. This internship taught me that. When I felt like I needed more to do, I came to my site supervisor Monica, and my team lead Sierra, and asked them for more opportunities. They never once said no to me asking. They were willing to give me more opportunities, more chances to grow, and most importantly, more chances to learn. They were willing, and most importantly, excited to let me do more! For them, I am internally grateful.

Throughout my time at LYF, I was able to write about issues that mattered to me use the research skills from my history classes, and actually apply them to a public platform. Additionally, I was able to edit and fine-tune a piece about current events which allowed me to educate myself on the matter even further. As I developed more of my graphic design skills through Canva, I worked with our marketing team to send out social media posts that I made to promote our demographic survey. The biggest project that I was tasked with was being one of the two people to curate our newest addition: the LYF's Donor Newsletter. It is a newsletter that is meant to thank our donors, and I was able to with our Managing Editor Charlize to build the template, the design, the sections, and the content from scratch. It was beautiful to see it come together.

I learned how to set personal workplace boundaries from the company's culture. I learned how to take criticism and understand that the only reason for it is to make me better. I learned how to take care of myself first as the work can always be done later. I learned to slow down. I learned that I am a person who has immense value and that the skills I have developed over the years mean something.

LYF is such a welcoming community. Everyone there has a genuine love and commitment to the organization's mission. They were accomodating and helpful, and I never once felt alone during my internship which was such a nice surprise considering this was a remote internship. Overall, I love LYF, and this internship experience honestly meant the world to me professionally, academically, and personally.