Alumnae: Tanya Gonzalez and Nai Pak
Internships provide students with fundamental career skills that enhance the knowledge they gain in the classroom. Through hands-on, experiential learning, internships not only engage students academically, earning them class credit and important skills, but they also have the potential to become full-time careers.
Communication alumni Tanya Gonzalez (BA 2003) and Nai Pak (BA 2004) represent how internships play a vital role in an undergraduate student’s life. Both women landed positions at Denver’s KMGH Channel 7 television station shortly after serving there as undergraduate interns.
Gonzalez, who is now the promotions producer for 7NEWS, is responsible for creating on-air promotions that highlight the talent and the station. She also creates promos for Channel 7’s community events. As the promotions intern during her final semester of her senior year, Gonzalez said she wasn’t “just getting coffee or answering phones.” She had the opportunity to work directly on all aspects of the job—writing, editing and producing her own promos. Her hard work paid off when she was asked to return as a paid freelance employee three months after graduation. Six months later, she was hired as a full-time producer. In 2006, Gonzalez won what every television journalist aspires to achieve: a Heartland Chapter Emmy Award for a topical news promo, an honor for which she and the UC Denver communication department are extremely proud.
As creative services coordinator, Pak uses her communication degree for a myriad of responsibilities, including writing press releases, coordinating both station and community events, maintaining on-air inventory and managing the community calendar for the station’s Web site. While Pak’s job at 7NEWS materialized right after graduation, she believes all four of the internships she completed as an undergraduate gave her the experience that culminated with the KMGH offer.
Responsible for these successful internship opportunities is Suzanne Stromberg, instructor and internship coordinator for the communication department. She requires that students link class assignments with the work performed in an internship. “This really showed me how valuable my education would be outside of the classroom,” said Gonzalez. Pak echoed Gonzalez’s sentiment, saying that the communication curriculum prepared her for her internships through applicable and professional projects that she eventually faced in the workplace. “My classes engaged me in creating print ads and direct mail pieces, drafting press releases, storyboarding commercials and other real-world projects.”
Both Gonzalez and Pak strongly advocate for completing internships as a strategy for increasing one’s marketability upon graduation. “My internship was just as important as my college degree,” Pak said, “if not more important in launching my career.”