As any smart student does during exams season, I procrastinated. And how did I procrastinate? By looking for potential work experiences, of course! And look where it landed me. In the middle of Picniic. No, not A picnic. Picniic. With two I’s.
Picniic just so happens to be a local tech start-up offering one of the only products of its kind: the ideal family assistant, bringing together a variety of different features onto one platform, allowing each account to be shared between family members.As it just so happens, I went in blind. I didn’t know what I was up against, and I can’t say I felt particularly ready either, as I had no previous marketing experience. However, I was excited to start something new and uncharted, and I was confident that my enthusiasm to learn would shine and help me through. My transition was a fairly smooth one. My co-workers and supervisors guided me through their vision of my role, and assisted me in anything that I felt needed clarifying. I was able to talk with many members of the team to understand their position at the company and their role in the overall business process. Understanding that this was a learning experience for me, I was constantly supported through the guidance of my co-workers, and their abundant amount of feedback and insight into what was expected of me, what I had accomplished and my role in the business, as a whole.
Being given the experience to work at a successful startup, there was no day that repeated itself. Often times, I would come to work and not know what to expect. Because the company is a start-up, my role involved a lot of experiments, seeing what works and what doesn’t work, what is successful and what is less so, and several of the assignments were my own ideas. As a marketing intern, the majority of my work, as one could expect, revolved around social media. More than that, I was given the opportunity to brainstorm and create and implement new strategies to gain more traction throughout a variety of platforms.
The thing that surprised me the most, pleasantly I might add, was that not one single person at Picniic looked down on me, despite me being a student intern yet to walk across the stage to get her official sheet of paper. My ideas were taken into consideration and my thoughts were heard with quite a few of them being acted upon too. If an idea was liked by everyone, I was asked to create a proposal of how I envisioned the idea to go through. If the proposal was a success, I would then be in charge of implementing the said idea.
One of my bigger projects at Picniic was, in fact, to analyze the entire business as a whole, and look for new strategies that would ultimately change and smoothen the flow of the distribution of channels and channel partners. I analyzed the company as it was, our customers and their routines, and other companies in the same or a similar field, to see where we fit in and how we could improve. Because the improvement of the business is a continuous process, several dedicated weeks went into the meticulous research, brainstorming, and implementation of this entire project
I felt like so much more than just a marketing intern. Not only was I able to assist with the creativity and organization behind social media, I was also able to learn the use of different applications and software to help analyze the success of social media and other business implementations, and ultimately analyzing the success of the business, overall. It was amazing to take the skills and theories I’ve only learned by sitting in a lecture and apply it to the real world, and I have to thank my amazing co-workers for creating such a fun and collaborative environment that allowed me to thrive.
