Thanks and Farewell to SPINALpedia’s first interns!

SPINALpedia co-founders and summer interns at the beginning of the summer.

Our four interns, all of whom knew me as a teacher and coach in my previous job at their school, were hired for the diversity of skills and experiences they brought to our team and their enthusiasm for working on SPINALpedia. Now that summer has ended, we took time to reflect on the summer and their experiences.

Jack, our social media intern, told me in our final meeting “I liked the internship mostly because of the community and the community that we were helping. I found it valuable to help them through SPINALpedia.”

Jack worked hard to understand the intricacies of social media, helping manage our SPINALpedia Facebook and Twitter accounts, as well as exploring other social media outlets like Pinterest and Tumblr (which we now have pages for thanks to him!) He also explored web analytics, helping us understand where our traffic comes from and how to get more of it.

Ed, our SEO intern shared with me his thoughts: “It was interesting to learn about how startups get the ball rolling through various stages and how SPINALpedia has evolved through the years… it was truly a great experience for me.”

Ed learned more about search engine optimization and keywords to help SPINALpedia be more visible on Google. He worked hard to make each of our blog posts more SEO friendly, and gave suggestions for us to further improve. He also brainstormed ideas for getting quality videos from our users that we will be able to implement moving forward.

Jared, our publicity intern, shared that his internship was a “learning experience in the way SPINALpedia works and also that the (paralysis) community was that large…I thought it was either you’re paralyzed or not, I didn’t know there were different levels of paralysis.”

Apart from learning more about paralysis and the understanding the depth of the challenges facing the paralysis community, Jared relied on his experiences working with media and publicity to help us begin to frame our upcoming publicity videos and marketing campaign.

Nick, our community development intern, came to SPINALpedia with a personal connection to paralysis. His cousin, Kevin, was paralyzed a few years ago. He shared “having that experience with Kevin made me really want to get the word out about SPINALpedia to people because I would’ve wanted someone to tell Kevin that right when it happened.”

Nick worked all summer to build relationships with organizations, support groups and hospitals to help spread the word about SPINALpedia. He honed his public speaking skills by making presentations at local support groups and also at National Rehabilitation Hospital and Kennedy Krieger Spinal Cord Injury Center. He also made it possible to get SPINALpedia fliers to a number of spinal cord injury related events.

All together, our inaugural summer internship program was a success! We are grateful to all the effort and contributions of the boys this summer. They each brought something different to the table, and left SPINALpedia better than they found it. Thanks for everything!