When I explain my new job to friends and family, I often describe myself as a sponge. Being one of the newest team members at JP Marketing, I find myself diving into new opportunities every day, soaking up every chance to learn.
The last month at JP has been a whirlwind! In just a short amount of time, I have supported the grand opening of a local business — witnessing them saw through a 2×4 as their “ribbon cutting,” participated as an extra in a television commercial production, supported a pretty sweet photo shoot featuring apple pie (yum!), discovered the whole new world of website wireframes, sifted through county data of a recent public health campaign on STDs, and dabbled with animating a logo for an upcoming project.
In the ever-changing and unpredictable nature of agency life, I’ve recognized that the sheer willingness to absorb knowledge and information is crucial to being a well-rounded team member. Take my recent experience, for example. Knowing I enjoy the creative side of marketing on top of my strategic responsibilities as an account coordinator, our senior web developer invited me to collaborate on a wireframe project. I learned that creating a wireframe is like mapping out a “blueprint” for a piece of architecture. One thing led to another, and I got to animate the logo of a stork for the website, creating four frames of the stork’s flight cycle in less than an hour. While I had never done this before, my excitement was motivation enough to tackle the task. Now, I can leverage this experience on the account management side of the agency when I administer tasks on future web projects.
Another instance was my work helping interpret data to reflect our success in a recent public health campaign. Over the past year, JP has worked to educate underserved, rural, and hard-to-reach communities about the benefits of practicing safe sex, the signs and symptoms of STDs, and raise awareness for local STD testing. While creating our presentation to recap this work, I had to distill big campaign challenges into four succinct bullet points, including stigma, lack of digital access, lack of education, or cultural and language barriers among our target audience. My solution involved taking a broader view of these issues and seeing if they overlap and could be consolidated. Like a sponge, I’m always looking for a fresh new way to tidy things up with practical solutions to unique challenges.
While every day is different, a constant source of joy for me is the chance to immerse myself in these new and valuable skills and experiences. So, if we ever get the opportunity to work together, here’s my toast to embracing growth with enthusiasm and maintaining a positive, absorbent mindset. As the iconic yellow cartoon sea creature SpongeBob once said, “I am a happy sponge!”
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Lucca Lorenzi, Account Coordinator
