This summer I had the opportunity to work on the fifteenth floor of the tallest building in the area. On my first, thirty-second elevator ride to Maetrics’ domain I remember being nervous, but maybe more anxious. I didn’t know what to expect. I was there for a marketing position, but I had never taken a marketing course in school, nor read more than a few articles online about the subject. To make things worse, I was told in the introduction meeting that the sole marketing guy for their firm had moved on to a new company just a few weeks prior. At this point, I doubted how beneficial this internship would be, but soon after they explained what I’d be doing for them.
Over the course of the summer, I was to be their social media marketer and utility man. Maetrics uses the social media managing service, Hootsuite, which provides a platform for businesses to organize and schedule automatic posts. For the first few days, I was gathering a sense for the industry to understand how things worked, and what kinds of articles to post. I quickly learned what is right for a tweet is not necessarily the best for a LinkedIn or Facebook post. I researched the best social media marketing practices by looking at competitors’ pages to see what they did right, and by sifting through the various articles on social media. We developed an employee engagement survey to help gain feedback from employees, and hopefully be able to take a few quotes for our LinkedIn profile. Another project I helped complete was reducing a 3,500-word whitepaper into a 3,500 character, one-page magazine advertisement. Every morning I would gather information on the life sciences industry and our clientele to send the management team a daily update. I was able to sit in on weekly HR meetings and even offer my opinion when I thought of a good idea. The recruiters asked me to create beneficial tag lines to put in a pamphlet that we will give out at conferences when trying to find fresh talent. The best part of my internship was the president of the company’s go-to guy when it came to research. Every week he would have new companies, people, and products for me to research, so it kept me on my feet and gave me experience in digging to find information.
All in all, I enjoyed my time at Maetrics, and would recommend this company to anyone. My coworkers made the office a fun place to work, and the management works alongside you, not over a top of you. I am grateful to the Lilly Endowment for providing this opportunity to me. I now have a better picture of what I’d like to do after Wabash.
