Summer Internship

I spent the summer interning at Quintiles as a Corporate Digital Strategy Coordinator. Quintiles is the only fully integrated biopharmaceutical services company offering clinical, commercial, consulting and capital solutions worldwide. The Digital Strategy group is a fairly new group, part of the overall Corporate Communication (CorpComm) department. A big project going on with Digital Strategy this summer was the re-design of Quintiles.com, internally known as Q.com.

 My boss is the lead on the re-design, and I was her "right hand girl". We had a “core” group of 5 people including my boss, another Digital Strategy member, another intern, our outside vendor contact along with myself. We were each assigned sections of the overall structure to own from start to finish.  For each of my sections, I had to contact the department head and set up initial and follow up meetings to discuss and finalize content for each section. I worked with the HR department for the Careers section, CorpComm for News and Our Markets, and Marketing for Therapeutics, Events and Services. For the Careers section, I also helped to design specific templates based on the needs of the site and wrote content for certain pages.

 

In addition to working on the re-design of Q.com, I was tasked with the project of putting together the Digital Content & Style guide. This document would include information on how to write for our site based on our audience and our overall company strategy. It also included branding information (typography, color palette, fonts, and restrictions), template and wireframe examples, interface designs and examples of the live site. It will be added to the Marketing Brand Guidelines for the company, and would be a document to distribute to outside vendors who write for our site or create additional pages for Q.com.

 My internship has been extended through December as of now, because the site has not launched yet. I will help see the site through launch, and then develop a training guide for Quintiles employees and external vendors to learn best practices and ways to navigate through the CMS, Ektron.

 

My team was absolutely amazing from day 1, and I was never treated like a traditional intern. I was treated as part of the team where my suggestions and comments were weighed the same as everyone in the department. It's been a littly busy balancing class and work, but I feel its completely worth the few sacrifices I might make!

Suprise Interview!

Early this week, a recruiter from Company X (I’ll say their name in a later post if I work there) called and told me that the Marketing position I had applied for had been filled with a contractor because they really wanted someone to be able to work full time into the Fall. She said they found another internship that they wanted to talk to me about based on my experience. She sent me the link, and although it wasn’t a Marketing internship I let her know that I would like to talk to the hiring manager more about the position and just get some other details. I said I was available Friday morning, and she told me she’d let me know when the hiring manager would give me a call.

I never received a confirmation email, so I assumed he was busy on Friday morning and we’d schedule something for the next week. At 10am, I was woken up to my phone ringing. I answered and it was the hiring manager plus another colleague calling me about the position. I was in shock/panic because I honestly had no idea they would be calling me. So they started off telling me how impressed they were with my resume, and then jumped right into asking me why I’d be a good fit for the position. And that is where I really panicked. This was an actual PHONE INTERVIEW.  I really thought I’d be talking to them about the position details so I could determine if I was interested.  I somehow asked them for more information about the position so I could buy some time to grab my computer and pull up the description. I went into how I thought I’d be a good fit, and then they asked me a few more questions about my background and experience. I’m a little calmer now because I think I recovered somewhat well, but it was short lived because they asked me what questions I had for them. Clearly I hadn’t prepared any questions except how much does it pay, and I didn’t feel comfortable asking them that right off the bat. So I somehow came up with 3 questions for them. They asked me one final question, “we normally give our candidates a chance to wow us with a last statement as to why we should hire them since Company X is so competitive.” Yikes. I talked about a few of my strengths that I knew were important to the company in general and backed them up with a few examples from an old boss and project.

My surprise phone screen was over. I’ve never really had that experience where I had no idea someone would be calling and I was completely unprepared. I honestly didn’t think I would be offered the position because as a former recruiter, I would be able to tell that I was super unprepared to start off the interview. I talked to my Dad shortly after and he laughed at the situation and even thought they may have caught me off guard to see if it was really was flexible and adaptable to different, “surprise” situation. So I took it as a learning experience, and hopefully I won’t have to experience a surprise phone interview again.

Later in the afternoon, the recruiter called me and said she had some feedback about the interview. She said the hiring manager liked me, and wanted to extend the offer. I told her I’d let her know in the next week because I wanted to make the best decision. Clearly, I recovered better than I thought. My past as a recruiter definitely paid off in the situation because I knew how to recover and knew certain things to do and tell them. So my first interview of this internship search process turned out to be a success! At least now I know that I will have an internship this summer!

INTERNSHIPS!

Well it’s the end of January...aand I'm not too much further along in my internship search then I was 3 months ago. My goal over Christmas break was to apply for a ton of positions, interview in January/February and secure an Internship by March. Christmas break ended up being a little busier than I thought, so needless to say I didn’t apply to as many positions as I had hoped.

So now, here I am at the end of January fully submerged into classes/projects/meetings and added on top is the heavy weight of finding an internship. My dream internship would be to work under and Brand Manager in a consumer product market. Those positions are pretty hard to come by, and they are all over the US...California, NY, Maryland, Minnesota, Florida, Georgia, Texas...and that’s just a start.

So how do I start?!

Our Career Resources class is dedicated to keeping us on track for our search as well as teaching us interview, job searching and networking tips. We had a class last semester called the 2 Hour Job Search. This method was developed by a career coach at Duke to make a list of companies and match it with your alumni network, desire to work at the company as well as the timing priority. This has been a great tool for me in my search. It puts things into perspective, and forces me to go one step at a time. I have to step back and think...it’s only January, I really have until April to secure a summer internship. It would be amazing to have  one figured out so it would be one less thing to worry about like a few of my classmates, but I want to make sure I get the right internship to jump start my career in the Marketing field.

I’ve started applying to different companies so now I’m just waiting to hear back!