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My name's Ken Pelasky, a Senior Marketing major with a minor International Business,
and I'm from Ashland, Ohio.
I interned for Victoria's Secret Stores
and I really had a plethora of
learning opportunities and projects, I guess you could call them,
mainly on the research end. I interned in the Marketing Strategy Department
so my supervisor and my department had me looking at green initiatives,
so what's going on in the environmental responsibility realm of business,
but then also social networking. So, what we can do online more to connect with our customers,
whether that's through social networks, such as Facebook and MySpace
and also did some strategic patterning
of other companies that internalize their own social networks.
The accomplishment that I was most proud of I think was my social networking initiative.
It was my largest and most comprehensive project.
Had to partner with a lot of cross-functional teams to find out
what we currently do online and the kind of directions we could take in
marketing to our customer through social networks,
and different initiatives and I really used,
I presented my ideas to senior management at the culmination of my internship
and I think I saw the highest return in terms of learning how the business
operates and what our competitors do. It was the most inclusive of the projects and
I think I'm most proud of it and it was definitely the cornerstone of my learning during my internship.
This internship helped me grow as a business professional
in two ways. One, I worked firsthand with the professionals themselves so
marketing directors and managers, vice presidents, and even our time chief
marketing officer worked just about twenty feet from my desk. So, I was really
close to all of the people that make the biggest decisions.
Also, I've learned from having ownership of these projects.
It wasn't just, "Here's a section of the projects, we'll let you work on that."
They said, for example, "Here's social networking or here's the green space,
and run with it and let's see what you can do."
For the green initiative, I worked closely with an MBA intern from New York.
She was very willing to help out, but there again, we were really working as a team,
and I was able to actually manage, you know, some of the initiatives that were handed to me
and learned a lot from managing it.
I think the biggest competency that I gained from working at the Victoria's Secret Stores
was just learning to navigate such a large organization.
Right now, we teach business communications through a course here at the College of Business,
but really putting that into practice really helped me learn just the basics of
phoning someone, emailing them, meeting with an in-person and doing
this on such a large scale.
The organization is vast. We had offices in New York and have them in Columbus at two different locations.
So, just partnering with all of my internal teammates on a daily basis was really quite helpful.
This internship has been helpful with my job search right now
because of the networking component.
I worked with a lot of key players in Victoria's Secret that also have a lot
of connections at other companies as well.
So, talking with them, keeping in touch,
weather it's just sending an email or just calling them and saying I saw this
posting or looking for different opportunities here and there,
they're really looking to help me and having that close time working with them
really has helped me grow professional report with them.
I think the requirement of an internship here as a Business major at Ashland is a good one.
I highly recommend it, I highly support it, and i think it's a great way
to put what you learn in the classroom into practice.
My advice for students on internships really is threefold.
One: to go big,
really to push yourself if you want to go to a corporate internship try for that.
If you want to go to New York or LA and you're not sure whether or not you're going to like it,
try it for three months. See what you think.
The second one is to work hard and then work harder.
They're looking at how you perform everyday
and definitely don't slack during the day. You want to give your best
impression and want to do the best work for them while you're there.
So, go ahead and give it your all everyday.
And the third one is to just continually network.
You're there with business professionals, most likely in your major and really to
utilize that relationship, building what you have there at fingertips.
I think what makes the Dauch College of Business so different from others is the
close tie to the professors that I've been able to have here, whether it's in
the market department or otherwise,
they're always going to meet with you and talk to you about both
your academical and your professional ones.
One of my many transformational experiences here Ashland
my academic career has probably been the business communications course that I took
Fall semester of my Junior year. We we're required to do resume, cover letter, and
list of references for an internship that we're interested in and I did it on
Victoria's Secret and my professor said that it was is good to send off and so I
sent it and ended up in the internship through the connection I had.
So, that I think really allowed me to have this internship in without learning
the proper business communication methods and protocols, I wouldn't have been
able to land the internship as smoothly as I did.