At the beginning of the summer, I focused on a brand discovery project gathering data from their social platforms, conducting interviews, and researching the market. This allowed me to fully understand their brand and target market. I used that knowledge to drive engagement and followers on their social platforms in order to spread more awareness for the festival and their newly launched podcast. I also led research about potential investors to streamline fundraising efforts.Additionally, they asked me to plan networking events for the company in order to create the community within that we were trying to foster outside of the organization. These events included a Hamilton watch party and a discussion of the Netflix film Skin (about colorism in Nigeria) that was open to the public.

I didn’t necessarily use most of the skillsets that I built in my first year CBS but instead called on some skills that I hadn’t used in a couple of years since I left HBO’s marketing department. Yet, I was able to practice my presentation skills from my Leader’s Voice class as well as the event organizing skills that I picked up as one of my cluster’s social chairs. Additionally, I used some skills that I learned in Lead to help navigate some of the difficult situations that sometimes arose due to differences in opinion amongst the leadership.

Because the company was so small and had so few followers it was hard to fully promote things as much as I would have liked. I had to get scrappy and creative to find ways to drive engagement and viewers to the podcast without any advertising spend or the ability to add links to our Instagram stories. Another challenge was navigating how to work with a founder/CEO who was in a different time zone and who was getting a PhD while the majority of the staff was only working part-time. Luckily Google Meets helped bridge a lot of those gaps but it did impact the already low resources when there were just not always enough people around to try and get things done. All of this contributed to a different startup environment than I had worked in before, but the founders offset that with a full schedule of touch base meetings and sprints when time permitted.

My takeaways are just how much leadership matters in that it sets the tone for the organization. A lot of what I had focused on in business school was the hard skill-based classes, but after this summer I want to focus much more on the organizational and interpersonal skill classes. I don’t think I fully understood how leadership affects productivity until this summer. I also re-discovered my love for brand work and creating strategy decks. It’s a skill that I hadn’t pulled out in a while, and I had forgotten just how much I like that type of work. Having a dry run early in my internship helped me with my brand work and initial marketing strategy for the startup I also founded this summer. Polishing up those skills helped my team win a $10K grant from the Lang Center ,which will be re-invested into our business and will help us create logos and launch manufacturing.