Around March of this year, I found
myself in a position the majority of college students find themselves in: eager
to gain experience, yet entirely unaware of precisely what I wanted to gain experience in. Intimidated by the job market
and internship search, I set out to find an internship that could offer me a
wide variety of learning experiences since I was so undecided about my future.
Luckily for me, I found Webletes, an online recruiting website that specialized
in combine camps for athletes. As a start-up company offering a virtual
internship, I thought it would be a flexible, yet hands-on choice. I was right.
Immediately, owners Tim and Pat
Curran welcomed me on their staff. Over the course of five months, I helped
with a number of things. My main job was managing the Webletes social media
pages; I visited the Facebook and Twitter sites daily. I quickly learned about
the marketing world as I created Facebook groups, updated daily status, tweeted
about Webletes, and posted articles I had found on the ins and outs of the
recruiting process. Pat also trained me to make phone calls to athletes,
inquiring about their progress in the recruiting process and extending
invitations to their combine camps for football, soccer, basketball, and track.
The experience I gained making over 400 phone calls was priceless—a much-needed
lesson in marketing and sales. Additionally, Tim gave me the responsibility of
creating Excel files of the camp results and editing them to create specialized
documents for advertisers and college coaches.
I got the chance to meet with Tim
multiple times over the summer to talk about the future of Webletes and the
decisions that the company made financially and competitively. Because I worked
with a smaller company, I was privy to the decisions they made first-hand and
able to offer suggestions that they took into consideration and sometimes
implemented. I’m infinitely glad that I got to work with Webletes this summer
because instead of filing papers away as an assistant intern in a big company,
I got to be part of the process and decision making team.
Emily
Duke Class of 2015
No comments:
Post a Comment