Caroline Gehring

Responsibilities

My responsibilities include relationally investing in people by meeting with students weekly about their faith walk and spiritual health, plan out and post on Salt Company's social media while also creating summer event graphics and plan social gatherings for Salt Company Cedar Rapids students to stay connected and engage in community during the summer. Part of my responsibilities also were helping to plan, execute, and participate in weekly, summer, and future Salt Company / Veritas Church events and attend weekly staff meetings and intern leadership development meetings.

Accomplishments

My greatest accomplishment during my internship was planning and executing events from start to finish. From brainstorming, to designing the graphic, posting it on social media, announcing it at events, event prep, the actual event, and then the clean up/post event. This was fun because I had the freedom of choosing the event and everything about it. It was my project from start to finish and I was able to have creative freedom with it.

Learning experience

The greatest lessons I learned had to do with taking time outside of work to rest. I have never worked a 40 hour work week before, and in the world of events within ministry you are constantly with other people. It can be exhausting if you overwork yourself without finding a good work / life balance. The lesson I learned was taking time for life and not bringing work home with you. It has been nice to learn this early on in my career so that I won't burn out as easily in the future.

What advice would you give?

To put yourself out there and look for internships / jobs where you might not expect! Most companies hold events, so email a company you think is interesting about event / administration internships. It even might give them an idea to create an internship. One of my greatest passions is college ministry so I reached out to my college ministry blindly not knowing if they had a program and they had one they were starting that year! If I wouldn't have reached out I would have never known.