marketing internships

joining college gave me several opportunities to delve further into the business field, and the main areas of focus for me were sales and marketing. i've gotten the opportunity to work on two seperate Marketing Internships at my school, both focusing on various aspects of within the field, like social media, brand and strategy, and in-person marketing.

Marketing Intern @ the Associated Students of the University of California, Irvine

in my first year at UCI, i was selected to be a Marketing Intern for the Associated Students of the University of California in Irvine (ASUCI). i was onboarded to the 2024 Elections Commission, working on creating graphics that would encourage students to vote.

one of our main goals was to increase our student voting rates since, historically, UCI has always had incredibly low voter turnout. this meant creating an attractive theme for the elections to motivate voters to show up and invite friends, as well! after much deliberation, we decided to emulate our 2024 Election off of Taylor Swift's Eras tour because it appealed to a large population and perfectly matched with the social trends at that time. 

the next step was creating the actual campaign material that would be used to advertise the elections to students. weekly meetings filled with discussions and several designs on Canva finally resulted in banners, flyers, stickers, and other such material that was used throughout the elections! something i learned from this aspect of the internship was how to better use Canva's tools, such as alignment, grouping, etc., and the benefit of collaboration when it comes to marketing. together with the rest of my commission, we were able to think of a color scheme, general aesthetic, and specific designs! 

the final step of this internship was boothing---the more sales part of the internship. for the week of the election, as part of the marketing commission, it was my job to help run booths where students were encouraged to come vote! vote! vote! this meant putting in hours of my day towards persuading students to come up to the booth, explaining how the elections work, and maintaining enthusiastic communication throughout the entire time! i learned a lot of social marketing techniques during this part of my internship, such as speaking confidently, yet kindly, maintaining eye contact, learning to persuade over asking, etc. 

surprisingly, this marketing internship ended up pushing me further in the direction of consumer-interaction than it did content creation! although i had come in with wanting to do the behind-the-scenes creation of visual materials that consumers would perceive, i ended up liking the more sales-aspect of my marketing internship: the actual interaction with customers. from here, i solidified my passion in business, but i decided that my next goal would be to testing the waters with sales!

an amazing opportunity to do exactly this came to me when i joined fresh prints as a campus manager. here's my story:

Marketing Intern @ Giving Day

my second Marketing internship was for UCI's Giving Day, a campaign centered around raising donations for various departments. i specifically worked with the Department of Continuing Education, which was raising money for scholarships for students to use towards summer courses that could help them academically. 

my role started in research, figuring out exactly what was needed for this campaign and how i could go about achieving it. i started by delving into what my department did, as well as how their social media looked at that time to maintain brand cohesion. then, i moved into ideating engagement ideas for social media that could encourage people to donate: Instagram story polls rather than mere posts, asking questions in captions so people would comment, and other such ideas. next, i would create the social media posts using Canva for both Instagram and LinkedIn, being mindful of the aesthetic and professional requirements of their app. finally, i'd keep track of engagement metrics in order to tweak the next post before it went out.

throughout this experience, i learned what it takes to hop onto an existing team and create social media posts that fall under certain guidelines. prior to this internship, most of my content creation experiences were self-led, meaning they were completely up to my discretion. however, with this internship, my posts had to match pre-existing posts, be approved by a team, and generally follow a certain look. overall, i appreciated getting the opportunity to do hands-on work within the marketing field, and i truly learned a lot about what it takes to do social media marketing. click on the images below to check out some of the Instagram posts i created!