After finishing his first year at Indiana’s Kelley School of Business, Justin Speller (Kelley, ‘21) spent his summer internship as a Product Marketer for the Microsoft Xbox team, where he got exposure to life as a Product Marketer. Speller shared his experience working at Microsoft, and what it was like to be a Product Marketing Intern.
MBASchooled: What did you do for your summer internship?
I was a Product Marketing Manager for Xbox. The most important skills I had to use were time management, cross functional team collaboration, qual research organization and Powerpoint creation.
MBASchooled: What was it like to build relationships virtually? What helped? What was hard?
Building relationships virtually was actually easier than I thought. Everyone was very eager to network with me. I scheduled and completed over 75 networking calls/meetings this summer. That was the easy part. The hard part was being on screen for so long as it was exhausting.
MBASchooled: What was an important lesson that you learned from your summer internship?
I have learned to when in doubt keep pushing. Twelve weeks is a long time to feel like you have to prove yourself, but having a supportive manager and team makes all the difference. Also the company you are interning with wants you to succeed and you belong there.
MBASchooled: Knowing what you know now, what would you do to prepare in order to be even more successful in your internship?
Knowing what I know now, I would probably reach out to my team more to ask to help them with their projects. I would also schedule time to take more breaks and relaxing walks outside.
MBASchooled: What was a challenge that you had to overcome or work through?
Since I am MBA president at Kelley, balancing my internship and my position was the toughest thing I have ever done in my life. I had a pretty large midpoint deliverable in which I had to summarize all of the work/research that had been done thus far on my topic in a clear succinct deck while preparing communication to go out about the protests this summer.
My brain was so cloudy and it was so hard to concentrate on the task at work in the timeframe given while fulfilling my school duties. I laid out a 1 week action plan in which I increased my exercise and also reached out to my manager letting her know what was going on. Through the early communication I was able to push back the date of the presentation a day and get everything accomplished.
MBASchooled: What advice do you have for other MBA Interns?
Be resilient. Take your time. Everything will work out how it’s supposed to.