Agency Life

Have you ever accounted for every 15 minutes of your life?

Until I arrived at Liggett-Stashower, I hadn’t. I have worked at my school’s student-run agency and have interned at a large corporation, but nothing was quite like the first week here. There were job numbers for everything, and employees keep track of their days by recording every 15 minutes’ worth of work. That’s the process they use to bill clients.

With this system in mind, it’s hard to describe a “typical day.” Each day is broken up into different chunks of time, working on different projects for different clients.
That’s what I love about agency life. It’s no nine-to-five, doing the same tasks for the same people every day. Especially as an intern, you are given the opportunity to work on a variety of different projects and contribute to the overall success of that project. By being tasked with different assignments, you are really able to build a solid skill set and learn things you wouldn’t in a classroom.

In agency life, there is no “small” task. Every element is a part of the final product.

-Stefanie S.

Post Internship

Post Internship…Well, Not Really

At the end of the summer I decided that I wanted to try to keep my internship while I was at school. I was so happy that Liggett was able to extend my internship and was also very flexible with my school schedule. I work a few days a week, which is quite an adjustment from the full-time schedule I was used to in the summer.
My days are very busy and go by really fast. I’ve learned how much of a juggling act it can be—fitting work, school, extracurricular activities and some sort of social life into your week. But by having the balance of school and work at once, it really shows me how practical everything is that I’ve learned here and how I can apply it to my schoolwork. I am in an event planning class, and as part of the PR effort for our event, I decided to create a press kit to send out to local media. Having the knowledge and skills that I’ve acquired here really made the process go smoothly and it makes me feel even more excited and confident to take on more responsibility in this field after I graduate.

Lisa S.

Life after Liggett

Life after Liggett is part scary, part exhilarating
and part upsetting. It's kind of an odd feeling,
graduating from college and going into the "real"
world. You feel like you've accomplished so much and
all of a sudden you haven't accomplished anything; the
end turns into the beginning. You have to start waking
up early to catch the train, the bills roll in, and
instantly you're transformed into that person you
always dreaded becoming: a working stiff.
I must say though, despite all of this, you do feel
liberated in a way. You're free from being a
dependant, and you enter into a state of
consciousness.
And having completed an internship at a notorious
advertising agency like Liggett-Stashower opened more
than just a few doors for me. After I "graduated" from
Liggett, I packed up the bags and headed for the
streets of New York City. I was extremely surprised to
find myself interviewing at the most prominent shops
in the city (and the world for that matter), like
Ogilvy, Y & R, Ad Age, and McCann Erickson; finally
landing a job at an incredibly creative agency,
TBWA\Chiat\Day. I can safely say that if it weren’t
for my internship at Ligget, I never would have landed
the wonderful position I am in right now.
I would like to formally thank everyone at Liggett for
your guidance and torture (aka: a name that rhymes
with ark), and I wish all of you the very best of
luck.

Brandon LaGanke

Busy, Busy, Busy…

Since my internship at Liggett ended over 2 months ago I have been keeping busy with school, law school and job applications, and my new position as a public relations intern. After returning to Chapel Hill for my senior year at UNC, I applied for various PR positions on and off campus, finally choosing to accept one with UNC’s School of Information and Library Science. Although I am doing the same things that I was involved with at Liggett—writing news releases, monitoring news coverage, creating media lists and coordinating mailings—it has been a completely new experience because I only work for one client, the school. It has shown me a new side of public relations and I have learned more about libraries and information systems than I ever thought I would. My experience at Liggett helped me not only to land the position initially, but to impress my co-workers with my knowledge of various aspects of PR.

As I look back on my internship at Liggett, I have truly come to appreciate all of the people I was able to work with and the lasting relationships that I have formed. I look forward to staying in touch with everyone from the program and bragging to all of them about my basketball team come November…Go Heels!

Kelly M.

Life after Liggett

I’ve been back in classes at Ashland for about 9 weeks now and it’s been such a different semester than usual. Before the internship I felt like I was just going through the motions—class, homework, more class. Now I feel like I am more prepared for class, but even more importantly, I know what I have left to learn. My career goals are much more defined, and I have gained a lot of confidence in myself. I have to say when I turned in my internship portfolio (to gain academic credit for the internship) my advisor loved all the L-S project memorabilia like the t-shirt and our class CD. She said it was definitely unlike anything she’d received before…and I got an A ;).

On another note, I must say that as an intern class, we’ve been doing a pretty good job of keeping in touch with each other. Two of us have already graduated and are working towards full-time jobs, and the other six of us are plugging away at senior year. It’s neat to see what everyone is up to post-Liggett, and I know I’m going to stay in-touch with these guys well into my professional career.

I said it earlier and I’ll say it again—if you don’t apply for this internship, you’re missing out. It’s honestly been one of the (if not the only) neatest and educationally fun experiences of my collegiate career.

Jennifer Maxson