Good morning. Spending ungodly amounts of time searching for the right YouTube video to watch with our food has become a major 21st-century issue. To fight the good fight, New Intern promises to continue uploading engaging interviews every Wednesday at 8am PT. We only ask that you cut us some slack when it comes to the video blurriness … we’re working on it.

In all seriousness, though, this week’s interview is worth the watch. Linda Tan describes the unique circumstances that led up to her internship with a storytelling approach. I highly recommend you watch it here. But, of course, if you’re strapped for time, keep on reading!

—Sean Sebers

In today's edition:

🏆 What earned her the role?

📊 What she does

🔑 Key Takeaways

📈 Give us more!

Linda Tan

Brand Marketing Strategist Intern

This past summer, Linda Tan completed an internship with Adobe as a brand marketing strategy intern. Adobe is a giant in the computer software space, achieving universal recognition for their wide array of creative software. Their mission is to democratize creativity and inspire the inner artist in all of us. They’re so revolutionary in the creative software space that in 1993, they literally created the Portable Document Format (PDF) … that’s wild!

Linda is also a senior at UC Irvine pursuing a bachelor’s degree in business administration with an emphasis in marketing. She is expected to graduate this spring 2023, but because of how many AP classes she took in high school, she’ll actually have her last two quarters off.

What earned her the role @Adobe?

Even though Linda’s internship took place the summer before her senior year of college, the journey it took to get there started her freshman year.

As a freshman at UC Irvine, Linda’s entire mindset was to find a job as soon as possible. She was using the OG job sites like Indeed and LinkedIn, but the one that landed her a job was Wellfound (formerly known as AngelList).

• Founded in 2013, Wellfound is a job site for people interested in working at startups, and for startups interested in hiring people. (Wish I knew about this sooner…)

After sending around 300-400 applications (holy smokes!), Linda was hired by Juno (formerly known as LeverEdge), a startup that aims to lower rates on student loans for its users. At the time, Juno hired her as an ambassador to print out flyers and pass them around campus. With refreshing candor, Linda shared that she didn’t really know what she was doing but thought that working for a company would eventually take her somewhere.

Fast forward to her sophomore year of college, Linda broke her leg while riding a bike (ouch). While bedridden for 3 months, she thought about her life in its entirety, and resolved to enjoy life without the self-imposed stress of applying to jobs. She started playing guitar, drawing, and painting. She even started an earring business where she sold wire earrings through Instagram because it was fun to do.

After some time passed, Linda revisited the idea of sending out job applications, but this time, she sent 10-20 applications with resumes that were catered specifically to each role.

• Linda made sure to include words from the “requirements” section of job listings in her resume so that company algorithms didn’t filter her application out of the pool.

That small batch of 10-20 applications (versus her previous 300-400) earned her four interviews at different companies, one of which was Adobe. It was her most successful batch to date!

Linda had an initial phone screening, and then two 30-minute interviews back-to-back. The vast majority of the questions she was asked were about her hobbies, her approach to life, and how she found creative outlets. In fact, they were most interested in hearing about how she started her successful earring business from scratch.

It’s safe to say she passed the interview with flying colors and earned her role as a brand marketing intern for that summer (2021). Adobe loved her so much that they asked her to come back the following summer (2022) as a brand marketing strategist intern. And now, we are officially caught up!

Keep in mind that this is a truncated version of Linda’s experience, and you can’t fully understand the scope of how cool it is until you hear it from her. Watch her here!

What she did:

As a brand marketing strategist intern for Adobe, Linda was working primarily with her manager. However, she was also involved with a group called the Global Marketing Strategy Organization (GMS) that was made up of different interns/university graduates and was facilitated by Adobe. This group provided a social aspect to her internship that allowed her to enjoy socials, coffee chats, and events with people her age.

Linda’s main role was to take a stab at making Adobe’s diverse voices campaign more prevalent in their overall brand. What on earth does that mean? We’ll break it down for you.

• Adobe markets their brand by finding companies to collaborate with. Each collaboration or partnership can be described as a campaign.

• One example is Adobe’s campaign with Billie Eilish where fans were encouraged to create art for Billie’s merchandise to eventually be sold as an item.

• Adobe’s diverse voices campaign focuses on lifting up underrepresented voices. Linda was tasked with making this campaign more effective throughout Adobe.

In order to do this, Linda was given the freedom to spend her weeks researching, reading, and exploring different topics that she found interesting/relevant. Since the role relied heavily on her perspective, Linda would spend some time taking walks, playing guitar, or reading books so that she could generate more ideas. She would meet remotely with her manager every week to discuss what she’d learned and exchange ideas. Linda described it as being a very fluid and subjective role because of how things changed—what really mattered was how sincerely she supported her opinions.

After countless hours spent researching company brand strategy examples, and reflecting on how it could be applied to Adobe’s diverse voices campaign, Linda presented a main thesis/framework to her manager. The main idea was that “Diversity should be discovered, not announced.” Linda was unsure why a diverse voices campaign was necessary when it could be an element present in all Adobe campaigns. Definitely food for thought.

Was this not one of the most inspiring things you’ve ever read? Feel free to reach out to Linda Tan through LinkedIn below and share your thoughts!

🔑Key Takeaways:

• Adobe focuses on candidates who've demonstrated a passion or capacity for creating. Having a genuine side project can illustrate this on your resume.

• Spending more time on fewer applications can result in more company responses.

• Brand marketing strategy requires global/domestic research, communication, creativity, interest in engaging audiences, and a deep insight into people and cultures.

📈Give us more!

💼Want to hear more from Linda?

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

🔍Connect with Linda!

• Connect with her on LinkedIn here.

📢Advice from Linda:

My biggest piece of advice is: when you're in those interviews, you have however much time (one hour or 30 minutes) to convince that person that you should be hired. I think a lot of people make the mistake of trying to come up with skills and share what they know. Instead, focus more on your mindset, thought process, and—I hate to say this but—convincing them that you're a good person. That’s all that matters. You don’t need to know everything, you don’t need to have all these skills, and you don’t need to know a bunch of things. It’s whether or not you're a good person who's an easy person to work with. Really focus on conversation skills, being an interesting person, and having things to say so that you’re memorable.

I had a conversation with my manager last week, and he told me that one of the main reasons he hired me was because he felt that he was talking to an actual person. Just be honest and say what you need to say—give them your story. If they like it, great, and if they don’t, find another company, that’s on them. You have a story to tell, and if they resonate with it then that's a great match.

Companies are interviewing you, but you are also interviewing them. Consider if you actually want to work at a company. If Amazon offered me a job, I wouldn't even take it because, personally, I don’t like the environment that they have, so why would I work for them? Interviews are an opportunity to figure out what you want out of that company. —Linda Tan

*Edited for clarity*

✋ 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!