Good morning. New Intern is back with another award-winning intern feature! For all my television junkies out there, this one’s for you.

Gaby Gomez scored an internship with Television Academy Foundation, aka the people who host the Emmy Awards. Keep on reading to find out what goes on behind the scenes as a marketing intern for the Emmy’s.

—Sean Sebers

In today's edition:

🏆 What earned her the role?

📊 What she does

📈 Give us more!

Gaby Gomez

Marketing Intern

This past fall, Gaby Gomez had an exciting experience as a marketing intern for Television Academy Foundation (TAF). This nonprofit acts as the charitable arm of The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences which is the parent company that hosts the Emmy Awards (I’m still bummed out Severance didn’t win best drama this year…). Despite not hosting the Emmys directly, TAF is heavily involved in many areas of the events. Though, primarily, TAF uses its resources to fund their highly prestigious internship program that pipelines into the entertainment industry. They also hold an awards event for college media artists, and many conferences related to entertainment/media.

Gaby is also a senior at CSU Fullerton pursuing a bachelor’s degree in cinema and television arts. She’ll be graduating sometime this year.

What earned her the role @Television Academy Foundation?

Last fall, Gaby was busy keeping up with her major academic courses and position at Michaels, a well known crafts store. At the time, she wasn’t too concerned with finding an internship, but she did send out around 15 applications to different media internships just in case. Similar to other interns we’ve interviewed, an opportunity presented itself to Gaby out of the blue.

One of her professors caught wind of an opportunity at Television Academy Foundation and passed on the info to Gaby and her classmates. The role wasn’t guaranteed, though. With the referral from her professor, Gaby still had to send an email to a TAF manager with her resume, cover letter, and a message expressing her interest in the internship. A couple days after sending that email, she was given an interview with her soon to be manager.

According to Gaby, the interview went fairly well and felt like a nice conversation. The really important part came at the end of the interview when she was asked to send in samples of work that showed her creativity in media. This was the game changing moment.

Gaby sent in a mixture of relevant school projects and personal works. She had analysis essays on movies she had written, templates for media posts she had made with Canva, some material she created using photoshop, and personal TikTok’s that proved she had the editing chops for social media.

Additionally, Gaby’s resume listed previous positions in retail along with her current role at Michaels, but this only emphasized her work ethic as opposed to her creativity. It was through her portfolio that she was able to express her creativity in media and her capacity for the role. She ended up landing the job shortly after sending in her personal works. Overall, it took around 3 weeks from the moment she applied to the day she received the internship.

What she does:

Gaby’s internship was a part-time hybrid role in North Hollywood, LA, which is, as Gaby puts it for us non-LA folk, just past Universal Studios. Since it was two hours away, she only went into the office once a week but worked remotely the rest of the time.

Gaby was mostly involved in social media campaigns, marketing research, and behind-the-scenes Emmy Awards social media work.

To promote diversity in the media and television industry, TAF has specific media campaigns for Hispanic Heritage Month, Native American Heritage Month, Transgender Awareness Week, and many others. To aid in these promotions, Gaby was tasked with researching actors and other media professionals whose careers improved these underrepresented communities. Gaby would do this by finding articles on certain celebrities and checking to see what kind of an impact they’ve made. She actually learned a lot about different people from all the reading she did for these featurettes.

Another part of her role consisted of collecting photo assets and writing copy for social media posts. If somebody on her team needed certain images of an individual, Gaby would use TAF’s company resources to find those images and upload them to their files. And if the team needed social media handles for certain people, Gaby would go collect those and keep them in a spreadsheet. She was also able to write captions and other social media copy for posts. There was always someone to double-check her work, but she was doing the heavy lifting.

In addition to all of that, Gaby was able to work behind the scenes at the Emmy Awards from the Los Angeles Microsoft Theater. There were three days of Emmy Awards: two for creative arts, and one for the Primetime event that everybody sees on television.

The entire marketing team rolled up and divided the work. Every social media channel was assigned two people who were responsible for posting live content as the event went on. Gaby was responsible for posting on Twitter, and she also had a partner who reviewed her work before it was released.

As the events started, Gaby would receive photos that had just been taken, and it was her job to put them into the correct folders immediately. She then had to format them for a Twitter post, write the copy for it, and get it approved by her partner. Any time there was a celebrity or television cast that her boss wanted a post for, Gaby was there to get it done. There were a few 10-minute commercial breaks that allowed the team to use the restroom, but once that time was up, they were back to the live content grind. Some of those event days lasted up to 10 hours!

The Emmys ended in a night of extravagance at the Governor’s Gala where all the celebrities and behind the scenes talent could enjoy each other's company. Gaby had a blast sipping champagne, taking photos with Coleman Domingo, and seeing the physical Emmy Awards close-up.

Feel free to reach out to Gaby on her LinkedIn below! In the future when she’s famous, it might not be that easy!

📈Give us more!

💼Want to hear more from Gaby?

• Watch the full interview on our YouTube channel linked here.

🔍Connect with Gaby!

• Connect with her on LinkedIn here.

📢Advice from Gaby:

Experience is important, but make sure you have something to show that proves you have the skills to do the job you’re applying for. I work at a crafts store so, for example, I could have said on my resume that I’m good at keeping up with high pressure environments. But, if I didn't also mention that I’m a creative person who has something physical to show and prove I’m capable of fulfilling the job requirements, then my application may not have been looked at as favorably. That’s the biggest piece of advice I could give. In my case, if I hadn’t sent examples of my creative work, I would have been worried that they would only focus on my lack of film industry experience. The key to unlocking an internship is getting companies to see that you have a capacity for their role. —Gaby Gomez

*Edited for clarity*