I have to admit that I wrote my elevator pitch in a bit of a hurry. The assignment had been weighing on me a little bit because I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted to say. I sat down one night and just started listing things out and once it came together I went with it. I was able to memorize it pretty quickly and execute an effective flipgrid. Looking back, I wish I had written the pitch a little differently and thought about it more.
What I did well in my pitch was speak confidently and include a well-rounded range of information. I started by explaining what I hope to have in a career. Then, I touched on my experiences, like the PR campaign. I talked about my current leadership role. I talked about my experience with Adobe and how I have spent 7 months in my current internship working with social media. I think talking about the PR campaign, my experience with Adobe and social media and then mentioning the fact that I currently hold a leadership role and have an internship was effective in touching on all of the facets of what I do.
What I wish I had done was go into more specifics on my current internship and what I like about it and the skills I have learned. Instead of just listing different bullet points from my resume, I wish I had put them into more context and given more detail. I am going to keep this in mind and continue to think about how I could rework this to make it more effective and provide information that can’t be found in my resume or portfolio.
Overall, the flipgrid was more preferable to doing the pitches in class. It was nice to be able to try, try and try again until I felt like it went well. This also helped me with the memorization because I had to do it over a couple of times. However, I am grateful that we only had to do it in small groups in class. My group actually had some very useful and meaningful conversations after we all presented our elevator pitches. I think it was definitely a worthwhile exercise and conversation.
I think I do an effective job of coming across confidently with my elevator pitch but, as I said, my content could use some work. I think the content is very bare-bones and I need to beef it up. It’s more of an outline than a paper. Moving forward, I need to decide what is most important to leave in and then elaborate on those points. I also need to figure out how I can quantify my social media work. I have looked into this a little bit but it’s not as straightforward of an answer as I had hoped. I think I will have to do some math…and we all know how journalism students feel about math.
I’m really glad we went through the exercise of developing and executing elevator pitches. I will certainly not forget about this experience for a long time!
Ruthie's Writings. 