Good morning. As crypto pyramid schemes run rampant and giant financial institutions collapse around us, one bank—California Bank & Trust—stands unfazed by the fallout. Find out how Will Vanderzanden, a recent intern for California Bank and Trust, landed his gig, and what he worked on during his internship.

—Sean Sebers

In today's edition:

🏆 What earned him the role?

📊 What he does

📈 Give us more!

Will VanderZanden

Marketing Strategy Analyst Intern

This past summer, Will VanderZanden had the opportunity to work for California Bank & Trust (CB&T) as a marketing strategy analyst intern. CB&T is a division of Zions Bancorporation, a company that does almost $3 billion in revenue per year. CB&T has 80 branch offices throughout California and $16 billion in deposits—something Silicon Valley Bank wished they had right about now. As a financial institution, they're very involved in business loans and small community banking. In other words, CB&T isn’t an evil corporate monster like all those other banks out there.

Will is also a senior at the University of San Diego pursuing a bachelor’s degree in finance and business analytics (double major). He’ll be graduating this year.

What earned him the role @California Bank & Trust?

Will used the jobsite trifecta—LinkedIn, Handshake, and Indeed—to search for every internship and position that had “analyst” in the title. Basically, anything that involved data and analytical work was what he went for.

Will would dedicate entire eight hour blocks to sending out applications. After he’d applied to everything he could find, he'd set an alert, check back in a few days, and start applying to all the new job listings that popped up. In total, he sent out over 200 applications! (And here I was thinking 30 was tiring…)

It took around two months for a response from CB&T to end up in Will’s inbox. From there, he skipped the calm phone interview stage and had an intense 30-minute character analysis phone interview instead. After that, he interviewed with his soon to be manager and the executive VP of the branch (also intense).

Don't sleep on relevant courses

Will showcased himself by explaining class work he had done and some of the technical skills he learned from it. He was introduced to Microsoft Access and SQL in class but continued to hone his knowledge of those tools outside of school. Even though Will had a prior part-time internship, he felt that it wasn’t as relevant as his data analysis skills and decided not to emphasize it as much.

Will’s approach to interviews also played a significant part in the hiring process. He intentionally tried to turn his interviews into conversations by asking CB&T what problems they needed solved, and how he could help where other interns lacked. Ultimately, his combination of experience and personality scored him the role.

What a marketing strategy analyst intern does:

The beginning of Will’s internship was—as Will eloquently put it—“terrifying”, and I couldn’t agree more. The CB&T marketing team asked Will to analyze their digital marketing strategy and determine if it was effective or not (using data, of course). They said he could ask for any tools he needed, but other than that, it was totally up to him to solve.

How could an intern complete such an open-ended assignment? Well, Will started with what he knew best: databases. He created a database to store the information of every Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook post that CB&T had released in the past year. He recorded the likes, comments, shares, impressions, tones, age targets, general content themes, and more for every post. Since recording data manually is torture, Will used the small bit of coding knowledge he had to find an HTML scraper to do it for him.

• Web scrapers come in different forms, but all have the same purpose of pulling specific pieces of data from sets of information.

After collecting CB&T’s social media data, he did the same thing for nine other banks. The resulting database had around 5000 entries. (Holy s**t)

With that much data, Will had to make sense of it somehow. He pulled it all into graphs and was able to draw insights from what he saw. To give some hypothetical examples, several charts might illustrate how financial advice works better on Instagram than on Facebook, or how promotional content tends to receive less engagement.

With these graphs and insights, Will created a deck with over 100 slides and presented it to CB&T’s marketing department. It was a huge success that led to him presenting to CB&T’s executive suite. I’d highly recommend watching Will’s interview to understand this project in full.

Project #2

Another notable project that Will spearheaded was for his marketing team’s digital assets (pictures, pamphlets, etc.). Understandably, the marketing team had resources stored confusingly in a bunch of Excel sheets, and they needed someone to make sense of it all.

Will combined all the spreadsheets into a database and cross-compared the digital asset ID numbers to find key insights. He quickly figured out when, why, and how each digital asset was being used, and then created a system for his marketing team to reach those insights easily.

There were a few other data based projects he worked on, but those two took up the bulk of his internship. If you’re wondering where Will is now, look no further than CB&T because he was actually hired again, but this time as an associate business analyst. No job could be more well-deserved than that one. If you’re interested in learning more, reach out to Will through LinkedIn, or watch his interview here!

📈Give us more!

💼Want to hear more from Will?

• Watch the full interview on our YouTube channel linked here.

🔍Connect with Will!

• Connect with him on LinkedIn here.

📢Advice from Will:

Ask good questions during your interview. The biggest question I asked myself first was, what can I offer this company? I then made sure to ask them questions like, “What is the problem you're trying to solve?”, and “What is the project I’m going to be working on?” Then after they answered, I told them how I’d approach solving those things based on my skill set. I asked if they had any prior interns and what roadblocks they had so that I could figure out how to do things better. Making yourself a commodity and saying that you’re coming to offer the company something goes a long way.

*Edited for clarity*