Internship Insights- Week 1

My expectations and why I chose to intern at Adventure Corporation

Questions I answer:

• Why did I select this internship site?
• What do I know about the organisation?
• What do I hope to learn?
• How does this internship fit with my major and/or my career plans?

I have always enjoyed working with people and using my creative problem solving skills to create positive impact. Over the last two years at UCLA, I have been going through a lot of personal and professional development and evaluated various career paths. The one that stood out to me and resonated with me the most was Product Management. I really love the interdisciplinary nature of the field and the ability to work cross-functionally with various teams to achieve the same goal. This is of course, creating the best possible for customers or users and generating value for all stakeholders. I decided to find and apply for internships in the PM space.

I was thrilled to receive an offer for a Project Management internship in the entertainment industry early in 2020. This would allow me to develop vital skills that are important and transferable for product management and expose to me a new industry. However, I lost my internship due to the pandemic. After rushing home for the summer, it was too late to find a good internship at a big company, and the time zone difference made working remote hard. But I persevered, knowing that I wanted to gain experience doing an internship. I believe that any experience is good experience, regardless of what it is. Even with the support from the UCLA Career Center and the Chancellor’s LINK (Leadership, Innovation, Networking and Knowledge) program, it was getting to late June and I still had not secured any internship.

But my perseverance paid off! After searching for and applying to many start-ups (who are more flexible), I managed to find Adventure Corporation. I applied for their Product Management Intern role and got an email back from the founder a few days later, who was interested in my background and experience. I created a mind map about me, showing my skills and interests (this can be seen on the Home page) as an initial project. As a sophomore, he found my qualifications impressive and invited me to join his team. This was how I ended up working at Adventure Corporation (previously known as Adventure Pizza), in a remote manner.

I am happy to be a part of the team because the start-up environment is very different from the corporate environment, and I know it will be an enlightening experience for me. The organisation is quite small in terms of number of employees, but they are working on very innovative projects using emerging technologies. As of now, I know that the organisation is a product development studio focused on building up a variety of projects and educating interns on various topics raging from blockchain to web development. I hope to get a lot of hands-on experience and learn about new technologies like blockchain and cryptocurrency. But most of all I want to develop my product management skills through this internship. This is a great opportunity and it really aligns with my career path. Specifically, this internship relates to both Computer Science and Digital Humanities (the subjects I study at UCLA) well. I know that I will get to look at problems from both creative human-oriented and logical/analytical perspectives.