Good morning. As Christmas and New Year's approach, there are a handful of questions on our mind. 1) Does $30 from grandma really justify attending the awkward family dinner 2) Will 2023 finally be the year I go to bed early 3) Did I just spend another year not securing a marketing internship. Survey says, yes, probably not, and yes. But fortunately for us, we’ve got the inside scoop on how Serina Rayan scored an internship with IKONA Health, what she did in that role, and what she thinks you should do to earn one too.

As for the other questions, I guess we’ll just have to endure the holidays as we always have. Have a merry Christmas and happy New Year everybody!

—Sean Sebers

There will be no newsletter 12/28/22

In today's edition:

🏆 What earned her the role?

📊 What she does

📈 Give us more!

Serina Rayan

Product Marketing Intern

Serina Rayan recently completed an internship with IKONA Health as a product marketing intern. IKONA Health is a medical learning startup that uses virtual reality and analytics to help medical practitioners/providers treat kidney disease more effectively.

Serina is also in her last year of graduate school at San Francisco State University pursuing a master’s degree in affective science. She is expected to graduate in 2023. Prior to attending SFSU, Serina graduated from the University of Central Florida in 2021 with a bachelor’s degree in health science.

What earned her the role?

Serina found this product marketing internship in an unconventional way. A couple years prior to being hired, Serina reached out to the CEO of IKONA Health directly on LinkedIn and asked if he needed an intern. After a short while, the CEO responded asking her to follow-up with him periodically, and that by the summer of her first graduate year, he would have a paid position for her. I know, right? She ignored the haters and went for it with nothing to lose.

Of course, that isn’t the whole story. It technically took her 2 years worth of staying in contact with IKONA Health’s CEO to finally begin her internship. She also sent out around 30-40 applications for marketing/health sciences roles and received 2 internship offers (one coming from IKONA Health). Additionally, Serina developed a habit of connecting with people on LinkedIn who had interesting roles and keeping in touch with them periodically. That's far more effective than when I add LinkedIn randoms to reach that “500+” label.

Prior to this opportunity, Serina did not have relevant job experience apart from being a well-educated student. This makes her story all the more impressive and encouraging for the rest of us. According to Serina, the biggest factor in getting her internship was having her initiative and persistence recognized by the CEO. Despite not having the longest of resumes, her ability to reach out, stay in contact, and show a genuine interest in the company is what got her the role.

What she does:

As a product marketing intern at IKONA Health, Serina’s internship had a more educational focus. She would constantly be attending meetings for product development, UX/UI discussions, and general project management. Absorbing the information from these meetings and providing at least one insight/suggestion to the team were the main objectives of her participation. In the time between meetings, Serina would utilize Miro, a team collaboration platform, to build workflows and manage her tasks.

• A workflow is a step-by-step roadmap made to track task progress. These are usually built using platforms like Miro, Figma, or Asana.

As that continued, Serina helped implement a company-wide exercise while building a presentation to showcase her internship experience. Serina suggested to the CEO an idea to implement some sort of personal goal measuring process for each employee to foster new growth. He loved that idea and had every employee work with their direct supervisor to hold themselves accountable for specific goals.

Serina personally wanted to improve her marketing and communications skills, so after having spoken to her supervisor (the literal CEO), she planned to create a capstone presentation. Using Loom, a video communications software, Serina worked on an extensive PowerPoint that highlighted all the knowledge she learned and all the work she had done. After recording herself presenting, the video was viewed by the CEO and other employees from the company. I’m not sure if my readers can relate, but I would have definitely forgotten to delete my post-presentation celebration from the recording. So, props to Serina for finishing strong!

Now that her internship is over, Serina is continuing to work on her master’s in affective science. She is also working as the head of marketing for Birdseye Publication, a student-led entrepreneurial publication.

Feel free to connect with her through LinkedIn!

📈Give us more!

💼Want to hear more from Serina?

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

🔍Connect with Serina!

• Connect with her on LinkedIn here.

📢Advice from Serina:

There are many different ways to get an internship. If you’re going to go through LinkedIn, you need to find specific people who are working in roles at your level before you reach out to people who can give you the job. Before I was reaching out to managers or people in higher positions of power, I would talk to interns at those same companies and learn how they got into those positions. When you start doing these types of informational interviews, do a lot of them.

On the flipside, when you’re being interviewed, take every single one seriously, listen to yourself when you're speaking, and listen to the compliments people give you. Usually when people give you compliments, you tend to think it is an area that you don’t need to improve on anymore, but it’s actually something you should focus on strengthening more. It’s knowing what your strengths are. If people have a good first impression of you, you can get through many doors. So, take every interview seriously, make good first impressions, and listen to yourself to find your strengths and weaknesses. —Serina Rayan

*Edited for clarity*