Nolan Morse ’18 Handshake – This summer I had the pleasure of working for Handshake – Stryder Corp. as an intern on their Customer Success Team. I worked closely with both the Account Management and Technical Support teams during my 12 week stay with Handshake. If you haven’t heard of Handshake, they’re a very mission-oriented company with the goal of democratizing internship and job opportunities for college students and graduates. Their platform is a job board and a career services tool built into one. This means that the team really has to build and support three products and customer types; employers, students, and career services users. On the Customer Success team, my largest responsibilities were to manage the data collection, validation, and analysis behind the largest data initiative the company has undergone. We collected informatioan from nearly 150 different schools about student engagement across demographics, class year, majors, etc. This allows the company to not only measure success for the schools that join the platform, but also allows Handshake to make sure that it’s effectively succeeding in its mission; democratizing opportunity for all college students. Some of the other projects I worked on involved creating metrics to measure customer success, and helping to develop strategies and tools for some of the company’s largest support scaling initiatives since their creation.
One of the most interesting parts of working at Handshake was the benefit of the company still being very much a startup in terms of company culture. It was wonderful to be able to talk with leaders of different teams on a daily basis, and the company hierarchy felt very flat. While I had a direct supervisor and coordinators as part of the internship program, I was also able to work closely with the founders on a regular basis, and it never felt like I was an intern, I felt like part of the team. I’d like to take a moment to thank the CEO of Handshake, Garrett Lord, for leading such a wonderful team. I’d like to thank the other founders, management, and the rest of the Handshake team for being such helpful, friendly people to work with. I’d also like to thank Alex Amerling, the Wabash alumnus who helped me throughout the internship by providing supervision, support, and a lot of very wonderful insights into the tech industry out in San Francisco. In addition to those at Handshake, I’d also like to thank the Wabash College career center, CIBE, and Roland Morin for helping me with this opportunity, and the the Small Business Internship Fund for continuing to support Wabash Men in their professional endeavors.
