The Summer Intern

Summer Internship - A DNW Perspective

When you are a small agency, every team member is valuable. At DNW we are a lean team of digital media professionals, and in the winter of 2023, we decided we wanted to add a summer intern to the mix. In full transparency, we didn’t need the day-to-day help, but on the recommendation of a trusted advisor to the agency, we utilized the Degrees of Change internship program to find an intern. The program goal is to invest in the future of the Puget Sound by identifying exceptional college students and recent grads from underrepresented backgrounds and matching them with top, local employers.

Often, we think of the experience of having an intern through their eyes, but it’s also important that we think about the long-term gains of having an intern for the full-time team too. The team will get opportunities to get hands-on, train, and mentor someone new. Upon reflection, we wanted to get anecdotes from our team on how having an intern impacted us along with what experiences did we learn along the way.

The future is a two-way street when bringing on an intern, and below is our team’s view of the experience, how it impacted them, and hopefully what they were able to learn during the summer internship program.

Ben Nussbaum

Overall, I would give our intern a 2/10 on coffee-getting skills, and 4/10 on lunch-order skills. Aside from that, it was a really great experience. It gave me time to reflect on not only how far I’ve come since I was a college student, and how far the intern will go in life. Taking the time to explain the basics of programs, workflows, strategies and beyond helped me continue to solidify my base understanding of digital marketing. The intern's willingness to learn was an 8/10 and ability to do sometimes seemingly unnecessary work for the sake of learning was a 10/10. I felt fortunate enough to get the opportunity to take a college student under my wing and give them real-life experience that will help shape their future career in this field.

Agam Jain

In an era where information is more accessible than ever before - not only through search queries, but also through AI-driven chatbots that answer questions in a conversational manner - challenging someone in an unfamiliar environment (i.e. our intern with tasks) is simultaneously both assuring, knowing help is available whenever needed, and frustrating, given the applied-nature of our work in digital media.

Helping mentor a summer intern provided me with the opportunity to learn myself, how to balance providing an appropriate level of guidance when working on something new, and allowing for failure and resistance to provide invaluable lessons. By the end of the program, I can say I had a reliable hand in trafficking campaigns, which in the world of media, is far more helpful than just getting us coffee. :)

Tanuja Apte

Playing the role of mentor for the first time was challenging and exciting for me but 10 mins into the new role made me realized it requires a different mindset to be able to give dedicated time to someone and within that your 100% focus in today’s remote/hybrid work culture space.

Finding a fine balance between mentoring and not overstepping or micromanaging is also an art that I am sure many managers/mentors must be facing in today’s work culture environment and more so in our field which is vast and needs more background information or I would a holistic perspective. I would say this experience as a mentor had an incredibly positive and valuable impact not just on my career development, but this finely structured DNW internship program was able to give an in-depth experience and overarching view of digital media world to our amazing Intern Alvin. This internship gave him hands-on practice/experience on researching keywords for search campaigns, formulating budget recommendations to building different types of campaigns in Google platform (Search, YouTube, Display). Lastly, I believe giving any person who is fresher in any field an opportunity to shadow other team members and an opportunity to sit in various meetings right from vendors to partner agencies to clients helps to gain a complete perspective and clarity on the ongoing projects/tasks at hand and ability to understand the industry and workplace in better fashion and more at a grassroots level.

Emma Scott

Over the past few months, I have had the privilege to work with Alvin, DNW’s first-ever intern, and it was such a treat. Being somewhat fresh in my career I haven’t had too many opportunities to take on training projects, so I was excited to get going and Alvin made it easy! His genuine desire to dive into the industry and learn anything I threw at him made training feel like a breeze. As much as I enjoyed seeing Alvin grow into his internship, I also selfishly enjoyed it because it was a great refresher of all the things I work on. Like many people, I have always felt I learn best by teaching others, it tests your knowledge and sometimes brings new perspectives from the fresh eyes of an intern who is not already knee-deep in the industry.

One particular day Alvin and I worked on analyzing the data from a small-scale brand lift study. This was interesting for me because I also have limited experience in this area, so I really had to make sure I knew the dang thing before trying to teach it to someone else haha. Having the responsibility of guiding another person through things like setting up a campaign, writing reporting notes, analyzing data, and everything in between makes you want and need to have your own processes dialed in. In a lot of ways, it feels like working with an intern is just as much training for you as it is for them! It was truly a wonderful experience that I hope to be able to take part in again and again.