What Is LINK?
Link is a 3 week long internship at the end of the year where all juniors are out of there classes and out in the community to do whatever internship they choose. The purpose of link is to start giving juniors real world experience and also help give them a taste of a potential career idea.
Belong Designs
Belong Designs is a Lifestyle Apparel company that was founded in 2013 in Denver Colorado to help spread the message of following your passions and doing what you love.
Belong Designs is a Lifestyle Apparel company that was founded in 2013 in Denver Colorado to help spread the message of following your passions and doing what you love.
Anticipation and Preparation
When we first started to look at potential internships I was very fortunate because I ended up getting mine with one of the first companies I reached out to. I sent one email to one company before reaching out to Belong and I never heard back. I had known about Belong before we started looking for internships and I thought they were really cool and the company was founded on a lot of the same beliefs that I have so I sent an email to one of the owners. A few days passed and I had not heard back from him so I sent another email. Within a couple of hours I got a response. After a couple of emails back and fourth and a phone call, I had the internship and we kept in contact until it got closer to Link. Going into the internship I didn't have any expectations and I just wanted to go in and help out with as much as I can for the 3 weeks and take in as much information as I could. I was hoping that I would be able to make things a little bit easier for them for a few weeks and that I would learn a lot in the process.
Project
For my project I was prospecting for places in other countries. Prospecting is looking for stores to reach out to about potentially carrying your products. I created a spreadsheet with over a hundred different stores in several different countries so later on my mentor could start reaching out to them.
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Reflection
Going into my internship, one of the things that I felt like helped me the most was my communication and avocation skills because they helped me build good relationships with my mentor and coworkers from the beginning which i'm sure made things a lot easier because we were all able to effectively communicate to get things done the best and most efficient way we could. One tip I would give to students going into link would be to stay open-minded and try and do whatever you can to help out because your internship isn't going to be exactly what you expect. For the majority of my link I was doing fairly tedious and repetitive tasks that helped out a lot, but nobody wanted to do them so as the intern, that's what I was doing a lot of. Even though I spend most of my time completing these tasks, my mentor would take time every day to show me more about different products and show me different little things that he was working on. I really feel like just being there taught me a lot because I got to see what everyone was doing and they would tell me about it so I learned so much about business and marketing, and the backside of things like what it takes to start a business from scratch. These are skills that I think are very valuable and can be implemented into a lot of different situations. Overall I didn't have any major challenges during the course of my link but whenever little things came up I would ask my mentor or someone around that would know the answer to my question and they would usually be able to help me figure it out. I got a lot of things done during the 3 weeks I was with them and tried my best to get as much done as I could and I definitely think they saw that and saw the value in the extra help I was giving them because I would constantly get a lot of positive feedback about how helpful what I was doing was to them. I thought it was really cool to learn about business and marketing because that's something I have thought about a little bit for a potential career option. If I decide to pursue a career in business or marketing I think the skills I learned during my link will give me a good kick start.