A Different Type of Communications

While I know that most of you are nearing the end of your internships after long and adventurous summers, mine is really just beginning! My internship just started after the 4^th of July weekend. And now that I’m getting the hang of it around here, I feel comfortable enough trying to explain what it is we do.

I met my boss when I was in New York in March on the JAFA trip. There was a networking night the first night we were there, and it truly was a random meeting. Someone introduced us and the next thing I know she was giving me her card and telling me to email her about a possible internship. I interviewed shortly after I got back and was offered the position in mid-April.

The business I am interning for is called The Haykel Group. My boss, who was a grad student at the J-school, started the company herself. What we do here is something called simplification. Companies come to her when they have a lot of paperwork that they want consolidated. The Haykel Group usually accomplishes this by taking a look at the papers or whatever communications they need work done on, and deciding what can be cut out and what needs to be re-written so that customers can understand the jargon. They also take a look at the communications system as a whole to see if they can use technology somehow, like putting some of the information on a website.

Before I started working here I honestly had no idea this was even part of the communications industry. But now that I understand it, it makes complete sense to me. Companies usually are not thinking about writing the information on their paperwork in ways that make sense to people other than themselves, which is why someone with a journalism background is perfect for the task. When we start writing a story, we go into it not knowing anything, ask the right questions, and then become experts in putting it ways that makes sense to the reader. The Haykel Group does this to understand companies’ policies and business and write about it, and then design comes at the end. Only after cutting down and re-writing are the papers and forms designed to look better and fit it all in.

It’s definitely an interesting area of communications and writing that I never thought about, but it encourages me that there are a lot more areas than magazine and newspapers that I could put my journalism background to use to widen my job search.