Second Week on the Job

Now that I've worked a few days here at Discovery, I have a better idea of what type of things I will be doing this semester.  Stephen Wakefield, my supervisor, makes sure I am always busy and I'm always doing an array of different things.  This makes the day fly by because I never have anytime to get bored.  Yesterday Stephen had me draft an introduction about myself and send it out to various people at Discovery to ask if they had time to set up a meeting and tell me more about themselves and what they do here.  Today I had two of those meetings- both of which were very informative.

My first meeting was with Jennifer Iras.  She is a VP of Distribution Marketing in Domestic Distribution.  I almost wish this was not my first of these meetings because  feel that now I will be holding all of the other meetings to a very high standard.  Jennifer spoke intelligently and was very interactive with our conversation.  She explained the breakdown of Discovery and how we make money through the different facets of the company.  She also stressed the importance of a strong back bone and of creating bonds in the work place and more importantly maintaining them. She is absolutely without a doubt the woman I will strive to be in the workplace.  She is strong but not in an intimidating or standoffish way, but rather a professional one. 

My second meeting was over the phone with Lance Rougeux, who is the a National Director for Discovery Education who works with planning and operations for the Discovery Education Network (DEN).  He told me about the community that DEN has built over the last five years for teachers who are spread out all across the country.  This interactive tools lets these educators connect and share their materials, ideas, etc.  DEN also does many webinars and blogs as well as face-to-face events such as summer week-long programs.Within DEN there is a smaller group of the more interactive educators, and these are the STARS.  Within STARS there is an even smaller group, The Leadership Council (also educators around the country).  This group helps set up and plan events for local DEN groups.  Lance started as a teacher and uses his expertise and experience as a former teacher to help run this program.

Besides my meetings, I worked on various other projects today.  I typed up a few articles that were from print publications.  I was assigned two bigger projects today- one that involves creating a pitch to the North American Precis Syndicate (NAPS) and one that involves researching Discovery Education's older press releases and creating a press release for new districts that have recently acquired our services.