Best of Both Worlds: HR and Marketing @ PenFed - Work Lesson

In high school, I became an Economic Club of Washington DC Scholar. Being an Economic Club Scholar qualifies us for an internship in our junior and senior years of college. The economic club of Washington dc has an exclusive internship program for recipients once they are juniors and seniors in high school. I applied and got the internship, and because of my interest in HR, my placement was PenFed Credit Union. PenFed is in Virginia. I worked as a floating HR intern that specifically focused on internship related work because that was my mentor's role. I rotated departments in HR every week. I also was assigned (as all interns were) to the extensive intern project for the summer.

Our project assignment was to create the new student loan refinance program for PenFed. I was on the marketing team where my role was to help do market research, implement plans, mock-ups, and strategies to market the new program. Being the psychology major I am, I was very empathetic to our target audience, who I assumed would not know what a student loan refinance product is (because a lot of interns including myself did not know as well). Thus, I was named the point of the educational component on the marketing team. The most appealing aspect of this was I got the workplace experience I wanted. I needed this experience to show if I wanted to work straight out of Spelman or if I wanted to go straight to graduate school. My primary assignments changed weekly. Mostly, I consistently worked on the graphics for the educational sector while also educating myself. I created the 2019 Intern yearbook. I also created a job description template for compensation. Lastly, I researched other internship programs at competitors to see what we are doing well and what PenFed could improve on. I spent more of my time multitasking different projects. At first, it was frustrating trying to give "great work" because no matter what I did, I felt like my work was not good enough. But I persisted and tried my best. I started taking my time on projects and triple-checking them, so they were near perfect. A difficult challenge for me was doing the research project. It was very extensive, and I sat a desk while researching the information that was difficult to find online. I started to become creative with my decisions by studying other websites and apps other than the companies site. This project took me a lump sum of my summer because of the multitude of questions assigned to me. However, I treated it like a research paper at Spelman by siting my sources and providing all the information and request required of me.

This experience showed me that everything is google-able, and when it is not, it is always a way to find it without having to ask. I also learned that I would love to go into the work-force after college, but I do not want to sit at a desk all day. I am more intentional with the roles I apply to and classes I take after this internship because it solidified that I do want to work but now shaping and finding the position that fits my needs. In the future, I would network more.

Everything in life is figureoutable, and I can get through anything, primarily due to the environment I was in that summer. This experience was the first time that I felt unseen and unheard. I was one of the two black women and one out of the three black people in the whole internship. So working hard to show my work and provide impact is how I will approach everything in the future. This work helped me realize that HR is very trivial, and I enjoy marketing. Thus, the big picture is still figuring out what roles I like and dislike. My impact was creating the educational sector of the marketing pitch, and the Executive suite members LOVED our graphics and approach while the IT team was able to implement our four-point thursts to their mock-up for the app. Also, I created a yearbook that encapsulated all of our memories. All of my creativity will live on as they stated it was the best yearbook they had thus far. Everybody loved the internship. A lot of my peers accepted their full-time offers from PenFed.

Summer Internship 2019-FINAL COMPLETE (2

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