The Professional Internship in the Television Management Program

The Television Management Graduate Program believes in the value of experiential learning. TVMN students find internships in a variety of television and related media companies where they learn by doing.

Philadelphia is the fourth largest television market and TVMN students have found internships with Comcast corporate, Comcast SportsNet, PBS/Sprout, NBC Sports Channel, all of the owned and operated stations of ABC, NBC, CBS, CW, FOX and the Tribune corporation, and independent and public television stations. Students have worked at Discovery Channel, Sony, MTV Networks, the FCC, and Sesame Workshop, to name a few venues.

What follows is a description of the professional internship in the words of the students who have experienced and learned from it.

Brittany Buschel on Internships



Before becoming a full time employee at QVC, as an Online Marketing Coordinator, I had interned within the department for eight months, and I cannot express enough the amount of learning’s and knowledge I gained. An internship with QVC’s Online Marketing team was an amazing opportunity while in school, working to receive my graduate degree while gaining hands on-the-job experience at a top local company. As an Online Marketing Intern, I helped support the paid and natural search areas. This included, updating and building out new and existing PPC advertising campaigns, updating lists of keywords and urls for search and partner campaigns, running daily/weekly/monthly reports for paid search program, performing analysis for the team of existing campaigns and well as brushed up my skills within excel, access and data analysis. Although I discovered that paid search was not the area where I wanted to continue my career path in, this internship ultimately lead me to Affiliate Marketing, which is the field I am passionate about and specialize within today. Not only did the internship lead me to my current employment opportunity, but also provided me with an in-depth knowledge base concerning all of online marketing and the vast possibilities the field has to offer both television and business.

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Shengrui Wang on Internships



The internship at Sesame Workshop is one of the greatest experiences I’ve had, studying in the United States.

The working environment is so lively: the floors are covered by carpets of rainbow colors. At every turn you take in the office, you might encounter a Sesame Street Character, Grover sitting in the sofa, Abby waving her wand on the wall or Oscar the Grouch leaning on the trashcan. People are friendly, happy and enjoy what they do. That’s indeed the magic of Sesame Street-making you enjoy working no matter how close the deadline is or how tightly meetings are scheduled.

An idea came to me after a few months I studied at Drexel, that I want to work for children’s television. Professors at Drexel told me if you want to do children’s television, you’ve got to watch Sesame Street. They were right. I felt in love with it right away. Sesame Street is such a good educational television show for children, with its own unique humor and educational curricula. Children are assured to gain knowledge and meanwhile have fun by watching the show. I set my heart for Sesame Street since then.

A producer at Center City Film and Video, a production company based in Philadelphia, recommended me to a lady working at the Special Projects department of Sesame Workshop. Through a telephone interview, I told them about my thesis project, which is about including Chinese culture into domestic Sesame Street. Luckily, I got the opportunity.

At work, because I speak Mandarin so that opens more opportunities to meet people since Sesame has its co-production in China. The Sesame China team came to New York for the training of their puppeteers and wrangler during April 2010. I got the opportunity to work as a translator for the wrangler. One week of training at the Henson Workshop gave me some basic knowledge of how puppets are made, prepared and maintained. Later on, I participated in the script review session for Sesame China, helping with cultural and language consulting. Recently, I did the market research for Sesame Street Chinese, a new project aiming at teaching Chinese to children in America.

All these observations and practices have greatly advanced the development of my thesis. Through a curriculum, scripts, and a new puppet character that I designed, the project will endeavor to address the close relationship between Chinese and American societies with the goal of fostering friendly attitudes towards Chinese and other foreign cultures.