Sravya Vishnubhatla is an incoming MBA student at Wharton. In this interview, they share their experience with a Pre-MBA Internship and how it is helping them as they think about increasing their career development opportunities while an MBA student.
MBASchooled: Why did you choose to do a Pre-MBA Internship?
When I applied to business school, one of the primary reasons was to change my role and responsibilities to better suit my interests. I studied engineering at MIT because I wanted a strong technical background as the world becomes evermore technology centric. From there, I began working at Microsoft as a Product Manager on Windows, one of the most ubiquitous brands in the world. My work primarily centers around building features and product lines within engineering. Marketing and Brand Managers explore the outside world and pass us data about customer trends, analytical insights, purchasing patterns, and more. From there, I work to build the right features to fit those needs.
I find this external view to be incredibly interesting and want to play the role of determining how to bring value to an organization. In an effort to transition from Product Management within Engineering to a Brand Manager role, I hope to pursue a Marketing major at Wharton. I know I only have one internship to really solidify my interests if I want to hit the ground running in my career; therefore, a pre-MBA internship seemed like the perfect way to kickstart my exploration in a new field and industry; figuring out whether I fit in and if I will enjoy these roles.
With an MBA program, there’s really only one summer of experience to pad your resume and pivot your career path — by pursuing a pre-MBA internship, I was able to add another summer of experience into the mix.
MBASchooled: How did you find the opportunity for this internship?
While digging around in different resources both online and provided through Wharton resources, I saw many internship opportunities for the summer.
Paintru caught my eye during this search! Paintru is a custom portrait company and has a really nifty product. As a modern generation, we’re all used to taking pictures of our memories on our phone or a camera and saving those to post on Instagram or Facebook. When looking for the perfect way to really immortalize those memories, though, the options are printed canvases or framed pictures.
Paintru came in and totally changed the game! In just three easy steps, you can take your precious memories and have them hand painted by a professional artist in any medium of your choice. Simply upload a picture (or group of pictures, if you want to combine different images), select a size, and choose a medium (oil, acrylic, or watercolor). From there, you embark on an incredibly personalized process to create a beautiful piece of art that will stand the test of time.
When I heard about what this company was doing, I was immediately intrigued. As a professional dancer and serial philanthropist, I have a special interest in giving back to people and tugging at their heartstrings. Being a dancer means I am always trying to elicit an emotional response to my performance and convey a particular theme or story. As the founder of a non-profit in the edtech space, I derive much joy and gratification from empowering young children to achieve their dreams and circumvent their obstacles. Paintru touches on a very similar visceral human element of touching hearts through their memories, and I found that to be very relatable and compelling.
I reached out to them and, after a few interviews, was excitedly brought on board as their first Marketing hire!
MBASchooled: What did you gain out of the experience? How has it been valuable?
This experience has been great! I was able to try my hand in a bunch of new things:
- A start up
- Marketing roles
- Getting ramped up virtually
- Consumer products
- Direct to consumer
Coming from big tech, these are all new experiences for me! I have always loved thinking about consumer products and users, which has come in handy working on Windows ;), but really immersing myself in the space has taught me many things.
One of my big projects this summer has been creating and leveraging our customer engagement channels to help our start up grow. Creating these relationships has been a new experience for me, but more interestingly, harnessing the relationship and digging into their experience has been a great learning experience. It is a fine art to interview customers and uncover their hidden thoughts. Many times, people think one thing consciously but are actually triggered by something else subconsciously. Uncovering these implicit needs and desires is the most important part about creating a product and determining how to best satisfy your customers.
The second aspect of the customer engagement journey I have thrown myself into is leveraging those stories I uncover to relate to more potential customers externally. Being able to take these insights and formulate a relatable and understandable value proposition so other consumers can understand how they can fit into the Paintru story has been a great learning experience!
I also think it’s opened my eyes up to how I could pursue my own startup, how being involved in a startup also connects me to the Philly community and social climate (we commissioned a piece for BLM and supporting artists during COVID has been amazing), and this internship in particular has given me a supportive network that I know will stand the test of time.
MBASchooled: What do you hope to do when you start at Wharton?
I hope to pivot my career into Marketing & Operations and move into consumer goods companies that are tech forward — think Nike, Target, Netflix, etc. I currently have an educational non profit that is growing quickly, so I hope to explore moving this into a for profit company with Wharton’s support.