PUSD Chief Communications Officer Josue Reyna started an internship, Influence Lab, for three Poway Unified School District (PUSD) students. Through this, they can become “influencers” for the district, creating videos about school life on social media in order to connect students with their district.
Two of the three students who were selected through a lengthy interview process are from Westview: Emily Nguyen (12) and Juliet Kim (12).
The Influencer Lab built on the previously established “Studio 701” project, where students from Rancho Bernardo High School make their own videos for social media, Kim said that the main differences between Studio 701 and the Influence Lab are the filming styles and objectives of the groups, as Studio 701 makes primarily news broadcasts and the Influence Lab makes shorter and less formal videos.
“For the Influence Lab, we make shorter videos for the PUSD Instagram, all vertical, so it’s not the same landscape and long-length videos [like Studio 701],” Kim said. “We’re tailored towards social media like Instagram and TikTok. I feel like we bring a bit more student voice into it, rather than just covering a story. Studio One is managed by the production teacher at Rancho Bernardo, and this year, we wanted to see how we might extend it and give birth to Influence Lab, which is our three influencers.”
We bring opinions about school, and we have this pen pal video format, where one intern will make a video on school topics, and then the next intern will address it.”
Kim said that the internship involves filming videos on their own as well as under the guidance of Reyna.
“We meet every Thursday, whether it’s at the district office or at Rancho Bernardo; we go through content ideas, and bounce ideas back and forth until we decide on a set plan for the filming process,” Kim said, “We got all new cameras, audio equipment, computers, and iPads to have platforms to edit on.”
The Influence Lab’s next coming story is a collaboration between Mount Carmel’s AP Psychology and AP Environmental Science classes. Reyna said that the trip helped them go over engagement numbers.
“We had a chance to take a trip to the San Diego Zoo with the Mount Carmel AP Environmental Science class and the AP Photography class,” Reyna said. “It was all of Studio 701, as well as our Influencer Lab. While we were there, we went over numbers around how many viewers we were getting and what strategies we can use around that.”
Overall, the program has combined marketing with media production in order to connect today’s students with their future opportunities, as well as to reveal positive aspects of the schools.
“We’re trying to build this brand for the district Instagram, where we want student voice showcasing all the amazing things on campus,” Reyna said. “What we’re learning right now is empowering world-class learners by showing them what is working today, coupled with what has worked forever — storytelling plus content marketing. It’s so much fun.”
The team is given a lot of creative freedom regarding filming and editing. According to Kim, this helps bring out her creative side.
“One thing that I really like about [the internship] is that it helps me find my own style of editing and filming, because we discuss what videos we specifically want with our own ideas,” Kiim said. “We all have our different creative touches in our different videos. I think that’s the really cool part about this, because it’s really up to your discretion, and you’re able to go with the flow. I like that, because it’s helping me build my own editing and style.”
Kim said that her background in completing all the digital media classes at Westview inspired her to pursue a professional internship.
“I knew that [digital media] is something that I’m going to pursue in college,” Kim said “I also like how professional [the internship] is. In this professional setting, everybody cares about the content that we’re making, and we have a lot more mentoring with the people managing the internship, which is cool.”
Nguyen said that she enjoys being able to reach a larger audience through the Influencer Lab and that her previous experience in Westview’s Broadcast Journalism class has prepared her well.
“We’re telling a story to a different audience,” Nguyen said, “I’m used to reaching the Westview students because of Broadcast Journalism. Now I’m in the social media program where I make content for the whole district: high school students, their parents, elementary-schoolers, and middle-schoolers. [It’s a] huge scope of people we’re getting to, which I think is the most interesting part of this internship.”
Reyna said that the internship program prepares students for the future as the job market evolves, in turn, bringing new career opportunities.
“One thing we haven’t really seen a whole lot of is students being prepared for a career in content marketing, specifically as an influencer, yet it is much more of a career option for students in high school now,” Reyna said. “We wanted to give students an opportunity to experience a career that’s a possibility for them later, which we call work-based learning.”
As the program is in its first year, Reyna said that altogether, they are still figuring out what works with the algorithm in order to create more successful posts. The team is currently trying out new strategies and different formats to see what does well on social media.
“Now we start to pull the levers, twist the knobs, push the buttons to work with the algorithm and see what it does to the numbers,” Reyna said. “For example, we see what happens when we move Emmy’s post to Tuesday instead of Friday, or put Joshua first instead of Juliet. By continuously monitoring and evaluating those numbers, we can monitor what works and what doesn’t. At the same time, [the students are] learning [that] concepts like the time of day when you post, the platform, the font you use, all matter when it comes to content marketing.”
