Half of my time in Manchester is already over now and, weirdly, it feels like I’ve been here forever, but also as if time has flown by quicker than ever. However, after my third week here, there’s absolutely no trace of homesickness at all. In fact, as I was standing at Albert Dock in Liverpool this Saturday, I was already trying to come up with a plan on how to miss my flight back to Cologne and make it seem like an accident to stay in England for a little longer (okay, let’s be honest, not just a little longer).
Unfortunately, reality soon caught up with me, and I had to admit to myself that dropping out of uni before even starting just to stay in the UK was probably not the best idea.
A bit gloomy, but also happy to at least be here for another few weeks, I hence made my way to the Beatles museum and spent all my money in the gift shop as a consolation.
After having a wonderful day walking through Liverpool, visiting museums and eating carrot cake in the park and going to the Jamaican Carnival on Sunday, the weekend was quickly over and it was time for me to return to the office. This week was all about working on new projects; beginning with Carrie showing me the finished logo for My Sales Academy, a new training and resource hub that is due to launch in November. To get the word out to businesses who might be interested in this new project, I started off by creating social media accounts for the website and making some images and banners to post on there.
However, it didn’t take long until Carrie forwarded me an e-mail she’d received from Pinterest, where my computer had apparently automatically changed the language settings. “Oh no! It’s in Deutsch!” Of course, we were also still working on our podcast, and since Carrie wasn’t in the office on Tuesday, she sent me the audios per mail so I could try to put together an intro and outro at home. I was happy to find that Audacity, the editing program I was supposed to use, was actually quite similar to the one I’d worked with during the internship I did at a radio station two years ago, so it didn’t take me long to figure everything out, which left me with plenty of time to make a little trip to Cheshire to have a look around Chester and Holmes Chapel. The next day, I was faced with a rather challenging new task: Creating a communications plan for actual clients! A communications plan is basically a social media guide customers receive alongside blog posts. I essentially had to come up with Twitter and LinkedIn posts and hashtags to promote articles that The Sales Way had already created.
This sounds like a simple enough thing to do, and some of the posts were quite easy to understand, but others dealt with such specific tech topics that I almost thought I was reading in a completely different language. Despite having to translate every second word and then despairing because I didn’t understand the German term either, I eventually more or less got what the articles were about and was able to write a few sentences about each one. At the end of the week, I then started to familiarise myself with a new programme called VideoScribe that My Sales Academy wants to use to create whiteboard videos. The idea of this really excited me as these kind of videos had always saved me when I was sat in my room the night before an important exam I hadn’t studied for, and needed a quick and easy explanation of biology terms like mitosis or that one mathematical formula I just couldn’t quite get into my head.
Thus, I already knew from my own experience that whiteboard videos, due to being so visual and easy to follow, are possibly the best way to get your message across.
After signing up and opening the application, the first thing to do was to decide on a font, and Carrie immediately had a favourite:
“What about this one? This looks good, I really like it!”
“Oh, that’s the Harry Styles handwriting font I downloaded last year!”
“Uhmm okay, shall we look for another one?”
Once we had settled on a different font (Sorry, Harry, your handwriting is still beautiful!), I began with trying to turn an already finished PowerPoint presentation into a whiteboard video, which – after a few initial difficulties, such as duplicating the whole thing and not being able to undo it and accidentally making the animated hand write so fast that it would probably have fallen off in real life – actually went pretty well.
When I was finished, I proudly showed off the video to Carrie, who only then realised that she’d forgotten to tell me that some of the files she sent me were in fact just examples she didn’t want to use. Somehow, the only natural response to finding out I’d just spent half a day working on these for nothing was to start giggling uncontrollably and not stop until it was time for me to finish up and start the weekend.
