Good morning. Now that the sun's out and people are in a better mood ... sort of, the perfect time to introduce our New Intern Ambassador Program is here! If you’re an SFSU reader looking to connect with other students while buffing that resume of yours, consider becoming a New Intern Ambassador for SP23. Learn more about it at the bottom of this newsletter.

In other breaking news, find out how Claire’s internship experience with Autodesk went, what she did in that role, and what she thinks you should do to get an internship too.

—Sean Sebers

In today's edition:

🏆 What earned her the role?

📊 What she does

📝 Quick Takeaways

📈 Give us more!

Claire Kennedy

Brand Strategy and Campaign Operations Intern

Claire Kennedy recently completed an internship with Autodesk as a brand strategy and campaign operations intern. Autodesk is a company that leases different kinds of design and modeling software to all types of industries ranging from architecture and engineering to design and entertainment. Even the movie Avatar (blue people one) used Autodesk software.

Claire is also a junior at UC Santa Barbara pursuing a bachelor’s degree in psychology and brain sciences. She is expected to graduate in 2024. Prior to transferring into UCSB, Claire was a student at Santa Clara University studying psychology.

What earned her the role?

Claire had the opportunity to intern for Autodesk through a family friend and she took it (who wouldn’t?). She still had to apply on the company website and go through an interview, but that referral was key. Regardless of the help, Claire did several hours of research on this company to prove that she cared about this role and was not just a spoon-fed. The effort paid off, and her interviewer (who became her manager) really saw that Claire was capable of the role. She ended up working at Autodesk for around 4 months.

Prior to this opportunity, Claire had done a marketing internship at a non-profit called Voices of Silicon Valley, and a brief legal internship for Kirkland and Ellis. Claire shared that these work experiences weren’t as substantial as the internship she was applying for so, in a way, she was starting from ground zero—where many of us are at right now.

What she does:

As a brand strategy and campaign operations intern at Autodesk, Claire spent her first month solely focused on learning new tools and organization strategies from the operations team. In twice weekly meetings, someone would show Claire something useful like a new software, a better way to be organized, or how to go about using internal resources at Autodesk. Afterwards, she would be given tasks that implemented what she learned like updating a website or drafting emails for company use.

As that continued, Claire was assigned a project that took the rest of her internship to complete. She was tasked with creating a campaign process model (CPM) for a brand for demand campaign. It sounds jargony, but here’s what that means…

• CPM’s are essentially step-by-step guides built by marketing teams to help anyone within a company to construct a campaign.

• CPM’s vary depending on the aim of the campaign and the people who are trying to make it.

• For example, Autodesk already had a general CPM to generate attention for the entire company brand. What they didn’t have was a model to boost brand awareness for individual Autodesk industries and products. Those industries included animation, construction, and architecture & engineering design.

So, Claire had to build a specific campaign process model that would allow the Autodesk construction team to create more demand for their branded products. Sounds difficult, huh? Well, that’s because it was. Here’s what she did…

• Using Mural, a collaborative brainstorming platform, Claire made a flow chart to plan every step of the CPM. For every step, there had to be outcomes/goals too.

• To give a paraphrased example, step 1 was “start a creative brief for a campaign and have ‘x, y, or z’ meeting”. For that step, one of the outcomes was to “have 50% of the creative brief finished”.

• In total, her CPM had 35 steps with an average of 2-3 outcomes for each step.

• Additionally, she made a fill-in-the-blank style deck (aka PowerPoint) that allows the team using her CPM to create an information log. For example, one of the slides read “list core team members and what their positions are” so that a team can keep track of important info while building their CPM.

Now that her internship is over, Claire’s campaign process model and deck will be used by the Autodesk brand and construction team to generate demand and interest in their product. Overall, Claire was proud and happy that she could do something significant in her internship.

Feel free to reach out to her through LinkedIn or follow her Instagram below!

📝Quick Takeaways:

• Brand strategy and campaign operations is a field of marketing that involves understanding a company, communicating to consumers, and building the infrastructure to make that happen effectively.

• This field of marketing does not require or rely heavily on a specific degree.

📈Give us more!

💼Want to hear more from Claire?

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

🔍Connect with Claire!

• Connect with her on LinkedIn here.

• Follow her on Instagram @claire__kennedy

📢Advice from Claire:

There are two big takeaways that I’ve come to realize from this internship. The first is that networking is so key. I talked to everyone on my team one-on-one and reached out to more people within the company to ask for a 30-minute chat. They never said no and were always so nice about it. Even if you’re not already in a company, I’d recommend narrowing down your internship list to opportunities you are passionate about and that actually seem to align with your interests. And don’t just apply to them, reach out to anyone in those companies you’re interested in and ask for a chat. You would be shocked how many people are so willing. I also feel like people really like to talk about themselves, but frankly, they have good advice to give.

The second thing I learned is that so many people do not end up in their roles from a straight path. I met people at Autodesk who almost became marine biologists or were getting a master's degree in political science at Stanford. In high school we’re taught that you have to know what you want to do, and if you don’t get certain internships, you’re not going to make it. In my case, I was really fortunate to have this internship, but it was still reassuring to hear how many people in good positions didn’t have any internships in college. —Claire Kennedy

*Edited for clarity*