Go for It: My Internship Story

September 2020. It was the email equivalent of a cold call. I had no clue if it would work or if someone was even going to read it. “Hello Andrew, my name’s Nicholas Stoll. I’m a current student at Ross interested in marketing. I’d love to connect with you and maybe speak with you sometime about your path. Thank you!” As a business administration student, I was told this whole “networking” thing worked. “Hi Nicholas! Always happy to chat w/ someone from Ross. My path has been pretty different from most, but I can share how things have gone. Looks like I’m fairly open tomorrow 4PM (EST) & on. Otherwise can connect in the coming weeks.” I guess it does. The person I reached out to was named Andrew DeLong, a market analyst for Samsung Semiconductor, based in Michigan. He was nice enough to actually respond to this random student reaching out, and we set up a time to talk. And so we talked. And talked. And talked. And nearly an hour-and-a-half later when we stopped, he learned enough about me to think I would enjoy Marcom and connect me with the team in San Jose. My next conversation was with Danny Pugh, who leads Creative for the Marcom team. The whole time I was thinking: Okay, yeah. Andrew was right. This is definitely what I like. Near the end of the call Danny asked me to send him my resume, my writing portfolio, and maybe a mock blog post if I wanted to — I was so excited, I did all three. Fast forward to January and I’m told I’ve got an interview. Then February, and I get an offer. Then May, and I finally get to start. I was so hyped to get going, I didn’t even care that it was virtual or that the office was operating on Pacific Time, which was three hours behind me in Michigan (Eastern Time). I’m going to be honest, right away I hit some bumps in the road. To start, I couldn’t get my computer to connect to the VPN, which I only needed to connect to my email, access documents, and essentially do any part of my job. On top of that, there was a passcode on my Samsung-issued work phone that I was meant to use for recording, and it needed to be reset. The only way to reset it was to wait for the phone to die. I can’t quite express how much I resented the Galaxy S10+’s lengthy battery life for those days (yeah, days) that I had to wait for it to die so I could do a factory reset it. But, I persevered, and had a great first week. I got to meet the entire team — each of whom I absolutely love — and even get started on my first assignment. The project was to take questions answered by Samsung employees and draft copy to highlight them on our Instagram page. I also wrote my first official blog post about the ISOCELL JN1 image sensor. When I saw both the blog and the Instagram posts actually published, it hit me that I was actually doing things in the internship that wasn’t just in the background. The team trusted me to actually contribute published work and let me embed my own creativity in it. And they kept letting me. I published more blog posts. I wrote more copy for Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. I also got to start my vlog series. Through the course of the summer I put out three vlogs, which I got to plan out, record, and edit myself, so they were really my own project. I covered my first few weeks, what a day in my life as an intern was like, and my time at the intern on-campus week for the three videos, respectively.

My favorite vlog had to be the intern on-campus week, simply because of the content. I had so much fun out in San Jose, getting to meet my fellow interns and team in-person for the first time. I had some great food, did some exciting activities, and got to see the absolutely stunning headquarters’ campus. My projects really rounded out with one in particular: the Powering Experiences podcast, Samsung Semiconductor, Inc.’s first ever podcast. I was tasked with researching, planning, hosting, and editing the episodes where I talked to Samsung Semiconductor experts about trends in the semiconductor industry and everything around how that affects our everyday lives. It was really rewarding, but not without its setbacks. The time-consuming nature of the project and the internship timeline just didn’t match up. Fortunately, I was able to postpone the end of my internship for a month in order to finish up. That month ran right into the start of my Junior year in college at the University of Michigan. It was certainly a large workload to handle, but I’m extremely glad I saw it through because hearing it and seeing it all come together was just a really rewarding feeling and made my 2021 internship feel complete. I feel I’m leaving as a much more knowledgeable professional than I was when I first sent Andrew my “cold” email. I know way more about tech, about marketing, about communications. I know more about what I like and what I don’t like. And I know that at least once a day I’ll get someone that walks up to me in between class and says: “Yo, Nick, I saw your videos on LinkedIn, you interned at Samsung this summer? That’s so cool.” You know what? It really was.