My experience as a semester-long Marketing Intern at Williams Whittle Associates has been invaluable as I have gained both technical and soft skills that will translate into my future career. Because the company is a smaller non-profit-oriented marketing agency, I had the opportunity to be hands-on with and involved in a variety of work. Additionally, I worked on multiple projects across different clients which taught me the importance of understanding each client’s specific needs since they vary vastly.
A highlighted list of my projects, including but not limited to conducting a survey to understand Generation Z media habits, multiple competitive creative analyses, database optimization, web dashboard building and analytics reporting, and general market research. These projects enabled the acquisition of a diverse set of skills including research design, data analysis, project management, creative analysis, market research skills, competitive analysis, database optimization, dashboard building, reporting, digital marketing, and an understanding of how media habits influence thinking and behavior.
As a marketing intern without a client-facing role, I was involved in many “under the hood” and back-end projects that supported strategy and campaigns. I aided in work that was both internal and external, which taught me that it is just as important for agencies to have proper marketing strategies for themselves as is for their clients. I derived information from analytics dashboards and translated these into digestible insights for clients to develop future strategies. Importantly, I had to adapt to ever-changing client needs and understand the differences between the goals of nonprofit and for-profit organizations regarding marketing strategies and analytics.
The work I was involved with at Williams Whittle was incredibly rewarding because I had the satisfaction of knowing that my projects would contribute to a positive social change. For example, simply optimizing a website for a sustainability-focused organization would help drive prospective consumers to the website and could lead to a larger recycling initiative, a better environment, and a circular economy. Williams Whittle is also a unique environment because though it has a physical office location, all of the employees are fully remote and live all across the East Coast. I had to build relationships and network with fellow employees through very limited communication channels – Slack, Zoom, and email. Williams Whittle has an extremely empathetic workplace culture – if you were to freeze during a Zoom meeting you could just simply hop back on. If you needed to pivot and run an unexpected errand mid-day, you were able to send a message to supervisors via Slack to let them know and they understood. Though working in this fully remote environment, I knew that my work had an impact because my superiors would keep me informed whenever my project was shared with clients directly.
Working at Williams Whittle allowed me to craft my internship experience around what truly interests me. From choosing clients in a specific industry that I want to work with to gaining exposure to certain business practices, I could curate my involvement. My supervisors knew that I am simultaneously working towards a Bachelor of Science in Marketing and a Master of Science in Marketing Analytics. Therefore, I was exposed heavily to analytics and data management to provide me with the crucial skills I need for my career path. In previous internships, I was exposed to marketing campaign strategies and copywriting. Though I still gained valuable experience and should have a general understanding of all facets of marketing, my skills were not being adequately utilized in areas like copywriting. This internship experience at Williams Whittle has been a nurturing experience, allowing me to harness the knowledge I need to continually pursue a career working as a Marketing Analyst.
