Lucas Holstine ’18 Hanapin Marketing – My experience interning at Hanapin Marketing this summer has been an absolutely terrific opportunity to learn about what the “real” world is like after graduation. I applied for the position with a keen interest in trying to find out what kind of job I would be interested in after my education at Wabash, and Hanapin has provided this for me. I have garnered a lot of interest in the field of digital marketing while working here, but have also realized professions I don’t see myself having, such as sales.

My position at Hanapin is on the Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) team. While the rest of the company operates on Paid Per Click (PPC) marketing that works to drive traffic to our clients website’s, the CRO team gets traffic through the website by making pages that are easy to navigate and ensuring that the goals on the site are clear and easy to reach by the traffic. Some of the projects that I’ve worked on have had me looking through analytics data to try and understand the experience that the user traffic has and to prepare presentations for clients to communicate these ideas clearly. I’ve also partaken in projects to organize data from previous tests that the CRO team has ran on client’s websites in order to make it easily accessible for future use to help make the team more efficient and effective. Most of the tasks that I do are time consuming tasks. The CRO team have also familiarized me with some of the big projects that Hanapin are conducting currently.

I have been very fortunate to have been sponsored by the Lilly Endowment while working at Hanapin. By being offered a full-time and paid position, it allows me to be fully immersed in the company culture and to build more relationships that part-time internships fail to provide. Hanapin has been terrific at making me feel like a member of the team with company wide picnics and team-building training sessions that have allowed me to connect with many other coworkers that I don’t normally have contact with. This experience has been something that I’ll never forget, and has definitely helped me build a solid foundation for my future endeavors.