I love traveling and exhibiting a learn-it-all mindset. This lead me to intern abroad in 2018 at a Shanghai travel agency called OKDeal. I wanted to immerse myself in a different culture to grow my perspective and ability to empathize with a wide spectrum of people. During this time, I worked with frontline teams to gain a better understanding of consumer needs, friction, and feedback. With that information in addition to my own personal research, I improved the overall customer journey and experience by redesigned the company’s weekly newsletter, kickstarting partnerships with opinion leaders, and others.

Knowing that I wanted to continue empowering people through tech, this past summer I served as a Marketing Intern for Vrbo, an online vacation home rental marketplace. I cross-functionally led a team of over 20 people in producing a 5-part educational video series plus its marketing assets with a $0 budget. The video series was intended to curb churn rates by serving as an improved training resource for our new partners, also known as hosts that list their vacation homes on Vrbo. Complete ownership of developing the video series in a fast-paced work environment exposed me to critical marketing techniques: developing customer-obsessed content, presenting key findings to company executives, collaborating with multiple teams towards a shared goal, and more. More importantly, I also learned the essentiality of diversity and inclusion when wanting to create a successful product.

As I move forward in my career path, I always want to pursue a learn-it-all mindset. Although I am excited to apply the insights and skills that I gained from past experiences, I believe it is more crucial to continue challenging what I know. The business landscape is continuously evolving and some firms that were once at the top have been wiped out due to their inability to stay relevant to consumers. Thus, what I desire to bring to a company are not solely hard skills that can be learned, but a growth mindset that seeks to discover new, unique, and valuable ways to meet consumer needs.

While I was leading the Asian Business Students Association’s philanthropic efforts as Volunteering Director, one major event that I spearheaded was called The Project 2018. This is UT Austin’s largest day of community service that is held every February to rebuild local underprivileged schools and neighborhoods.

When I heard of this news early October, I immediately interviewed to be a site lead and was assigned in charge of renovating the main high school. Just like renovations in the real world, these were carefully considered and discussed with key stakeholders. I view my overarching role as the bridge that connects eager individuals who are ready to volunteer with the community that they desire to serve. My other responsibilities as a site lead entailed encouraging, instructing, and overseeing the 130+ volunteers on the day of with repainting classrooms, fixing basic infrastructure, and others.

To prepare for all this, we site leads consistently trained from October until February. Hence, many hours were committed into this special day. However, I would do it again in a heartbeat. Witnessing your team bonding together and firmly believing that you are contributing towards a powerful purpose made this experience all the more rewarding.

These experiences not only opened my eyes to lifestyles that I had not previously seen, but also how organizations could make an impact on the community. In my career search, one of my priorities is choosing a firm that not only provides me with meaningful work, but also empowers me to make an impact on the broader community.

I’m someone who has an eye for detail, but this trait can affect me seeing the big picture because I’m so focused on minor details being perfect, which ends up costing time and resources.

For example, when I was a marketing intern at a travel agency called OKDeal, I was responsible for redesigning the company newsletter to better engage our target audience. A lot of time was spent on minor details such as formatting and color, but because I wanted it to look perfect, it cut away from time that I could have spent doing other projects that could have resulted in a bigger impact.

While being detail oriented is great in some situations, there needs to be a balance between able to see the big picture versus being stuck on minor details in the moment.

To help improve on this, when I focus is on perfecting details, in order to keep myself grounded on the big picture, I ask myself questions such as – what is the overall purpose of this project, why am I doing it, and what is the outcome I want, and is the detail that I’m focused on right now worth it? Or does it merely provide a small marginal benefit?

Using interpersonal skills to be able to work collaboratively with different personalities 

Many, if not all, of my past leadership and internship roles required me to work with a diverse group of people and teams. With that also means differing personalities and competing goals were present in each of these experiences. Through these experiences, I was able to use and refine my interpersonal skills in order to prioritize and support initiatives that were most critical and aligned with the overall company goal while still maintaining a healthy work environment with all parties involved

For example, this past summer I worked as Marketing Intern for Vrbo and was in charge of leading the development of a 5-part educational video series for our partners. I worked with both my manager and the Product Marketing Team to ensure that I was using the right messaging and tone for products within the video series. There was one point when the two parties, my manager and the product marketers, had opposing views on the specific wording for one section in my script. 

Although I was stuck at a hard spot in between, I knew one thing that both parties had in common: both desired a successful video series that would increase partner retention. So with that in mind plus careful communication, I conveyed to each party the other party’s perspective and positioned it as something that’s coming from a place of concern, not as a personal attack. My manager eventually agreed that the best route would be to go with what the product marketers were suggesting and we were able to successfully move forward with the video series with no tension.

Many firms are composed of employees with diverse personalities, backgrounds, and experiences. I know that my interpersonal skills will allow me to work effectively and empathetically with all stakeholders so that we can continue working towards a common goal.

During my time working as the Marketing Intern for OKDeal in Shanghai, I was faced with an ethical dilemma.

One of my day-to-day tasks involved updating OKDeal’s websites with our latest blog posts. The ethical part came later when my direct boss at the time suggested that I identify well-performing blog posts online, copy and paste them onto our website, and claim it as OKDeal original content.

I immediately knew this did not align with my principles. However, this was my first internship and my superior requested me to perform this duty. Do I risk possibly destroying the relationship that I have with my boss in order to stand up for my morals?

After a brief internal conflict, the answer became clear to me. I am interning for this company because my end goal was to grow and learn professionally so that I can contribute a positive impact to society. Thus, going against my beliefs and wrongly taking ownership of someone else’s content would not help me achieve this in any way.

After rehearsing multiple times, I communicated this message to my boss in a private setting. I also recommended that instead of copying and pasting these blogs, we can use them as an educational resource to learn how we can improve our own content. Ultimately, she respected my decision and appreciated the input, so I was able to continue on my role and develop fresh, unique assets for the company.

During my time as the Marketing Intern for Vrbo, my main project was to create a five-part video series to better educate our partners, consumers who list their homes for travelers to rent on our online vacation home marketplace. This was a highly cross-functional and collaborative project, so one problem that I encountered was that other teams would not have enough time or resources to support my initiative.

For example, I wanted to create a web page for my video series on Vrbo’s hub, which required me to work with a copywriter, designer, project manager, and others from the Creative Team. In order to solve this common business problem of having a limited amount of resources to balance, I decided to shorten the process of designing the web page by creating a draft for the Creative Team to work off of. This included formatting the layout, drafting out the designs on the page, writing the copy, and others.

Because of this, the Creative Team was able to provide quick feedback and turnaround because they didn’t have to work from scratch. This shortened at least a 2 week process to less than 1. I then successfully launched my web page for my video series by the deadline without damaging the relationship that I had with other teams within Vrbo. 

This experience reinforced the importance of being cognizant of other people’s teams and working as a team instead of competing against one another.

During my time as a Partner Marketing Intern for Vrbo, I worked closely with a more senior marketer who I would check in with on a weekly basis for the video series initiative.

At the initial planning stages, we were deciding between two ways of structuring the video content:

1. Make a 1 hour long video 
2. Make a video series with 5 shorter individual videos 

Brian was leaning towards the 1 hour option, but I believed that the 5-part video series would generate better partner engagement. I first listened to Brian’s perspective of why he preferred a 1 hour video over a video series. For him, it was a matter of simplifying production. From my point of view, however, splitting the series up would not only be more achievable for our creative team, but also would be easier for viewers to digest and therefore increase engagement.  I backed these arguments with existing data we had and was able to convince him to create 5 shorter videos.

Although I was an intern, I was able to influence by grounding Brian and I on the projects goals – to engage our partners through this video series.

Summer of 2018, I flew to Shanghai to start my first internship at OKDeal, a travel agency focused on providing low-cost tours to expats. As someone who is passionate about traveling, I was excited to help empower others to do the same.

Unfortunately, at the get go, I was not delegated meaningful work. Minuscule tasks such as translating and proofreading were given to me in order to keep busy. Knowing that what I was doing did not align with the original job description, I felt unsatisfied. Most of my peers in the cohort experienced a similar situation in their workplace but did not mind. However, for me, I did not want my 8-week internship to go to waste – I am going to take the initiative in my internship experience.

To demonstrate that I had significant insights to bring to the table, I spent time outside of the office to develop a marketing plan and presented my recommendations to my boss. This included an overall objective of increasing company revenue by 10% through implementing 3 different strategies, each with 2-3 tactics. This included improving the user experience by redesigning OKDeal’s website design.

Through this, my boss saw my drive to make a positive difference in the travel industry in China and made me in charge of OKDeal’s newsletter, social media, and others. Thus, I was given the opportunity to produce innovative marketing assets that would better the long-term relationship that OKDeal has with its consumers.

As someone who’s early in career, I see myself in the next 5 years building foundational marketing experiences, combining work insights with what I learned in school. I want to accomplish this by focusing on gaining exposure to a variety of marketing disciplines.

As someone who also enjoys tackling challenging problems, I look forward to applying this foundational experience to solving business problems and helping companies I work for stay relevant to its consumers.

Furthermore, I am a firm believer that I would not be where I am today without the mentorships in my life. I enjoy being a resource for others and desire to give back. Not only is it fulfilling for me to support others, but I find it even more essential in the workplace.