It has been three months of adventuring throughout the county, running around with my GoPro and Pentax camera, and giving A LOT of paddle lessons. I didn’t know what to expect going into the interview, much less the season, but now that the summer is nearly over I am leaving with lifelong friends, a resume booster and a summer I won’t soon forget.

My first indication that this wasn’t the average company was during the interview process. I had a Google Chat interview on the computer with Anna the business manager and Katie the program facilitator. I was dressed in a black blazer and had took extra time in the morning to make sure my hair and makeup was presentable. When the Google Chat connected they were staring at me through the screen with their hair in ponytails and Anna was wearing her winter jacket while Katie was wearing a Patagonia sweatshirt. They asked me more questions about kayaking and camping than my previous marketing experiences and that was kind of exciting. They really wanted to make sure their intern fit into their outdoor culture. Since I grew up hiking, biking, and traveling I felt that this job would be a summer dream. I was right, of course.

The first week of our 5-day orientation all the kayak guides, zip line guides and the marketing interns got to know each other and the company through team building exercises and going on all the tours the DCAC offers. We were all quiet the first few days but soon we got close through working together, living together and playing weekly trivia together. We became a tight knit group and refer to ourselves as ‘the summer fam’ in our group chat and Facebook group.

My job responsibilities as the creative marketing intern consist of taking photos and videos of our customers having a blast on our rentals and tours, updating social media accounts, writing blogs and newsletters, and also doing rentals at our locations and talking about tour options. Our other marketing intern does the analytics of the company through website coding, demographics, and occasionally mows the grass at a few of our locations (inside joke). Together we made a great marketing duo!

I used skills I had learned at previous internships here to grow our social media followers and company brand. While I strengthened those skills I also grew in other areas like customer service and got to get my feet wet in the tourism industry. All in all I’m going to miss the adventures and am so happy to of had the opportunity to work for a company with so much spunk and personality! Instagram and Facebook have become my babies and it is going to be incredibly hard to let someone else be in charge of it. I hope the next interns have an incredible summer with incredible co-workers like we did!

Over and Out.

Emily Reise, Marketing Intern