Intern Reflects on Experience at National Geographic

Dean’s Intern Nate Cover at National Geographic

Nate Cover, left, worked on scripts during his internship.

Last semester as an intern in the Ad Sales Creative & Cause Marketing department at the National Geographic Channel, where I had the opportunity to see and take part in the production process of sponsored promos from start to finish.

I have always wanted to work for National Geographic in some capacity, and while I will admit I never pictured myself working in the ad sales creative department for the National Geographic Channel, the position presented me with an array of challenges and rewards that I will carry with me throughout my professional career.

On a daily basis, I helped with scripts for custom sponsored vignettes, researched facts for did-you-know style spots, pulled footage from the library for clip spots, scoured music libraries for tracks to use in promos, and operationally prepared promotions for air.

Throughout the semester, I worked on larger over-arching projects as well. I collaborated with the other intern in our department to research ad sales in the competitive landscape for the non-fiction programming genre. I also worked with my supervisor to examine and collect footage from channel programming for their upfront sales tapes.

The most significant project during the internship involved working as a lead producer on a sponsored tune in for Panasonic’s Access 360°. I wrote a script and worked with the senior and associate producers as well as the director of the Ad Sales Creative and Cause Marketing department to revise and perfect the script. Then we took the footage and script to edit, where I worked with an editor to cut together a clip spot for the department and the sponsor to approve.

VIDEO: https://vimeo.com/81602654

I was able to draw upon the skills I learned as a broadcast journalism major, especially writing and editing scripts for television and radio, in this position. But I also learned a lot about television marketing, the ins and outs of ad sales, and promo production.

My time at National Geographic Channel definitely qualifies as one of the most defining of my career thus far. To have taken on tasks as diverse as producing my own on-air sponsored promo to researching and analyzing the competitive ad sales landscape, is invaluable at this point in my life.

View Nate Cover’s professional portfolio here.