Academics

Speaking for the music

Internship with Atlantic Records allows advertising/public relations student to tap existing skills, prepare for her career

Penn State senior Elise Bingaman's internship with Atlantic Records provides many opportunities for her to combine existing skills and prepare for a career in public relations. Credit: Photo ProvidedAll Rights Reserved.

(Editor's note: This is the seventh in a series of stories about students in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications completing summer internships.)

She grew up doing theater and has always been a dancer and choreographer — someone to whom music has always spoken.

Now Elise Bingaman is the one speaking for the music with Atlantic Records as their video promotions intern this summer.

Atlantic Records is a major record label that represents artists such as Ed Sheeran, Coldplay and Bruno Mars. Bingaman, a Penn State senior majoring in advertising/public relations, works in a department that interacts with media outlets such as BET, MTV, Nickelodeon and Vevo to push out its artists' music videos and promotional videos to these outlets.

It is Bingaman’s job to help her supervisors build and maintain relationships with those media outlets as well as evaluate music and promotional video performance analytics.

She said one of the perks of having the internship is having frequent live performances and concerts right in her office. Recently, she said Mason Ramsey, the 11-year-old boy who became internet famous for a video of him yodeling in the middle of a Walmart, came in and performed for the Atlantic Records staff.

“I think the culture at Atlantic Records is really awesome,” Bingaman said. “It’s really easy for you to talk to different people in different departments, so not only am I really in touch with my department, but I also know what is going on with departments around me.”

Bingaman said she has been assigned weekly tasks and she has learned to always work on them before being asked to do so. She said she always asks her supervisors for more tasks and things to accomplish so she can spend as much time as possible helping out and learning along the way.

“She’s organized and hardworking. She has a close attention to detail and she’s not afraid to ask questions when she needs to,” said Jessica Seewald, Bingaman’s supervisor at Atlantic Records. “She always goes out of her way to ask if anyone in our department needs help as well as other departments, and she has just done a really good job of making herself a part of a team.”

Bingaman has only been at this internship for a few weeks, but she is most excited to work on a semester-long project with other interns to create a digital marketing plan for an Atlantic artist.

“Then we get to present these plans to executives in the company, which is a huge deal,” Bingaman said. “I'm excited to work creatively with other interns to develop an awesome plan and present it in a real life situation.”

Bingaman is also looking forward to working with her supervisors to prepare for the upcoming Video Music Awards. She already had the chance to work with them on the BET Awards — it was her job to keep a running list of all the Atlantic artists who were lined up to perform that evening.

“I think one of the biggest things I’ve learned from this internship so far is, it’s really important to take initiative and always try and be as valuable as you can be,” Bingaman said. “That’s what I’ve seen, is everybody here is just so dedicated, which really makes you want to be just as dedicated.”

In the future, Bingaman would love to work for Atlantic Records full time, or to get a job with Disney doing public relations work. She worked with Disney previously as part of the Disney College Program. She worked as a character attendant at Epcot, which she said was great experience because her job involved entertaining people waiting in line for eight hours and constantly communicating with all different kinds of people, a lot of time through language barriers.

Bingaman said this internship with Atlantic Records is a great internship to prepare her to potentially do public relations work in the future.

“It’s really good for me to figure out how to work in the big corporate environment with lots of levels and lots of different departments for one company,” Bingaman said. “I think learning how that corporate PR experience can be and understanding that the little day-to-day tasks like data analysis, it all adds up to a bigger picture in the end.”

Last Updated June 2, 2021