Picture it, Ohio 1991 a year that will forever live in infamy. Well infamy may not be the best word, but I loved the dramatic flair the word brings to a sentence. 1991 was the year I watched my first episode of I Love Lucy at age 5 on Nick at Nite (back when Nick at Nite showed classic shows, but that is a discussion for another day). Anyway, I loved watching Lucille Ball and I especially loved how are names were so close. I thought for sure we were destined to be friends, but unfortunately she died before we could ever meet. But her show forever lives in my heart.
Thanks to I Love Lucy and other great shows I watched as a child, I fell in love with television and wanted to be a contributor to this industry.Thanks to my two classes with Dr. Chew, I realized that I had a love for programming and decided that media research was the best route to get to my goal of being a programmer. So I am currently a Market and Media Research Intern with Sesame Workshop, the company behind Sesame Street in New York. I got the internship through alum Jill Crane. She emailed Dr. Chew that her department needed an intern and Dr. Chew forwarded the email to me.
I have been at Sesame Workshop for 3 weeks. One thing that I observed (I have more things, but I’ll talk about them in another post) is how every department has to work/interact with research, which means the research department has many meetings to attend. With the popularity of Sesame Street you will be surprised to know that the Market and Media Research team is made up of only 4 people (well 6 if you count the interns). The amount of research they accomplish is amazing. Keep in mind that Sesame Street is international not only do they handle research that deals with U.S, but also every international version of the show. Their research goes beyond just ratings. They research Sesame “the brand”, the audience (who they are and what they like), products, show content and curriculum and digital. Like I said earlier, the team is pretty impressive.
Another thing I will mention is that with research you will use PowerPoint and Excel a lot. So if you plan to be in the media research field brush up on your Microsoft office skills. My personal favorite thing to do in Excel is to make a Pivot Table ( I think pivot is a great word). There is a little of my story. I’ll keep you posted on what’s happening on my journey down the longest street in the world.