During my summer at Puberry, I primarily worked on developing a marketing mix and ensuring our site flow was user-friendly — making Puberry.org welcoming and educational. Puberry focuses on providing a puberty curriculum that revolutionizes how youth learn about their health. The projects I worked on helped drive the discovery of Puberry on social media platforms and ensured the site included important information necessary for site visitors to take action. Through my efforts and the efforts of the team I was managing, we grew our social media following by over 100 percent and drove 20+ students to Puberry virtual classes over the summer. To achieve this, we created a content calendar and onsite — tracking to understand what actions were taken on-site and where people were stopping. I provided the developer resources and guided engineers on code implementation for inside tracking, I also led the team in developing the strategy as to where to post and the type of content to post, while the team led the execution and management of scheduling. Leveraging the best practices that I've learned from app development courses and the work experience I gained before joining GS. This project furthered the organization's mission because our work led to 20+ students joining Puberry virtual classes this summer, allowing us to expose and educate youth on puberty health through the Puberry curriculum, and also receive and implement their feedback; and the feedback of the nparents, and educators we met along the way.

I have not only built technical skills from my degree program that I was able to use during my fellowship but also the skills I've learned helped me collaborate and add value to the Puberry team over the summer. During my degree program, I have taken several computer science classes, exposing me to languages like SQL, Python, and Java, and to concepts like data structures, and object-oriented programming. The languages and the concepts were new to me and required a lot of initiative to succeed in these classes — to find the success I was looking for, I had to be intellectually curious, find resources, not be afraid to ask questions, fail, and try harder. Yes, technically, I did apply my Java language knowledge and read some Python documentation, but what truly assisted me were the skills I've built and strengthened while learning new computer science concepts I've studied in past semesters. I'm excited to continue my work with Puberry and increasingly exercise the more technical side of my skills and the soft skills that have helped me become a better student and teammate.

The challenge I faced during this internship was understanding what were the best decisions for Puberry. Startups don't have protocols or proprietary paths to success. As a project leader and contributor, I had research to understand where our opportunities were within the project scope, and which opportunities to invest resources and energy into. The other side of this was setting expectations and clearly communicating why I came to certain decisions, why certain decisions are preferred over others, and the risk associated with them. Our biggest challenge was figuring out how to get students to join, what pricing points we should start with, where we should drive users on-site, and what information we should include on the site to drive sign-ups. We looked at other virtual class sites for inspiration and tested language and landing page experiences and offers. After going through several rounds of site iterations, we found success and clear data points suggesting certain layouts work better than others. This was not only useful to Puberry's goals of driving 20+ class sign-ups (which we did), but also these are insights we can leverage later on.

My takeaway from my internship is that you have to be willing to pivot fast if you do not see results, and also, the goal may change along the way — and that's okay. At the very beginning of the internship, I had lofty goals intertwined with large organizational goals for my short time with Puberry. We quickly realized we had to isolate, prioritize, and focus on the most important goals and even reevaluate the definition of what success meant for those goals. I think what helped me the most was communicating challenges early and what I thought the impact of those challenges was. After communicating this, the team, being receptive, evaluated these challenges, the actual impact, and the feasible courses of action.

With this experience, I really enjoyed the team's level of scrappiness, communication, and collaboration. Moving forward, I plan to bring this level of collaboration to all team efforts I am a part of, and remember to self-audit and check in with the team as much as possible.