Good morning. As Thanksgiving approaches, I’m thankful that I’ve found a new way to incorporate music in my life. That is, by becoming a marketing intern for a major music company. For all of you who stopped going to your piano and violin lessons in middle school, this is for you too. Keep reading to see how Hannah secured a marketing internship with Universal Music Group, what she did in that role, and how you can do the same.

—Sean Sebers

In today's edition:

🏆 What earned her the role?

📊 What she does

📈 Give us more!

Hannah Schneider

Marketing Intern

Hannah Schneider recently completed a marketing internship at Universal Music Group (UMG)—the iconic and “universally” known music company that works with most of the artists you listen to. UMG has supported musicians for over a century and continues to promote famous artists ranging from Justin Bieber to Taylor Swift. It goes without saying that this internship was hard to get.

Hannah is also a senior at Scripps College pursuing a bachelor’s degree in communication and media studies, with a concentration in critical theory and a minor in anthropology. She is expected to graduate in May of 2023.

What earned her the role?

Hannah applied for a marketing intern position with UMG the classic way…through their application portal. In fact, she’s applied every year since her freshman year of college but was only given a call back for her junior year application—yes, “third time’s the charm” is a real thing.

But it wasn't that simple. Leading up to this opportunity, Hannah earned roles with smaller companies any way she could. She found several of her initial internships by researching small companies she thought were cool and then emailing them to offer help. These included:

• An intern position at Marquee Studios—a small influencer branding agency

• An intern position at Auteur Research Inc—a small music marketing company

• An intern position at 604 Records Inc—a mid-sized music label company

As you can probably tell, Hannah focused on pursuing opportunities related to her interest in music and marketing. It’s also worth noting that during high school, Hannah started a digital music publication for emerging artists called Unheard Gems. After 5 years of sticking to it, her publication has released 1000+ interviews/articles and is run by a team of 14 people. Don’t feel too intimidated though, there’s always going to be someone who started earlier than you, but it’s important to know that experience is not the only reason people get hired, especially in a field like marketing.

For Hannah, a background in journalism and public relations is what earned her the interview with UMG, but her answers during the interview are what earned her the role. She took a brutally honest approach with questions and admitted to not knowing much about marketing (at the time) and instead emphasized that she had a passion for supporting artists through media. This interview style was well received by the VP of marketing for UMG and scored Hannah a marketing intern role.

What she does:

As an intern for Universal Music Group, Hannah was sent to work for a subsidiary record label called Capitol Records. If that seems confusing, just think of it as having an internship with Meta but being sent to work for Instagram.

At Capitol Records, marketing interns usually work directly under a manager, but in Hannah’s case, her manager encouraged her to seek out projects from different people across the marketing department.

With this direction, Hannah became involved in several duties/projects that included:

• Sending email updates to department managers with info on streaming websites and territory performance. More specifically, she viewed data on how well certain webpages or music genres did across multiple geographical areas and condensed it for emailing.

• Making sure art cards or artist signed items were counted and mailed to direct consumer stores. (Acting as the middleman between management and retail merchandisers)

• Making sure that artist public relations (PR) packages were bundled correctly and sent to influencers on time.

On top of that, Hannah and a few other interns were tasked with revitalizing and maintaining the Capitol Records TikTok and Instagram accounts. One of Hannah’s video ideas was to combine artist lyrics with the “Little Miss” trend that was circulating at the time. It became Capitol Records' most interacted with Instagram post and was even featured for a moment in a VMAs slideshow. Together with her team, they raised Capitol Records' Instagram follower count from 10.8K to 12.2K.

Hannah’s desire to follow a career in marketing and music was solidified by this entire experience. There really isn't a better way to end an internship than by leaving with a career path in mind!

Where is Hannah now? See what she's up to and how you can reach her below.

📈Give us more!

💼Want to hear more from Hannah?

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

🔍Connect with Hannah!

• Connect with her on LinkedIn here. While you're at it, take a look at her experience history to see where you would stand for a similar position.

• Check out her highly successful emerging music website—Unheard Gems—here.

• You can find her Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter here.

📢Advice from Hannah:

• “Don’t let someone else in your life tell you what you should apply for. A lot of people think ‘what would make my parents happy’, or ‘what would make me a lot of money’, and ‘what provides me security’, versus ‘what matches my passions’ Everything is so intersectional to the point that if you were a data scientist who was also super passionate about music or film, there would be a job for you in that space. You would still be doing data science, but in something that's going to make you light up. So, do your research on the companies you genuinely enjoy and see if there's something for you there.” —Hannah Schneider

✋Get involved!

The New Intern team is always aiming to write for its readers. If there's anything you liked, disliked, or wished you could have read in this issue, please let us know!

• Reach us by replying to this email

• Know someone we can interview? Reach out and get us connected!