Summer Internship: A Day in the Life of Swetha Suryanarayanan
MBA student with a specialization in Information Systems
Hi there, my name is Swetha Suryanarayanan. I’m an MBA student specializing in Information Systems at the Fowler College of Business. I’m an international student from India. I’m halfway through my summer internship as a marketing operations analyst at GIST Technologies Inc. I’m enjoying the internship and learning a lot working here. I would love to share the experience of what I do here and why it is exciting to me.
I came across the opportunity to connect with GIST’s founder through a job post on Handshake, SDSU’s recruiting platform where jobs and internships are posted. Having worked at a Business to Business (B2B) startup for almost 4 years, the opportunity to work at a Business to Consumer (B2C) company was very intriguing to me. GIST is an application that helps get word-of-mouth recommendations online. The product is in beta and it is an exciting time to work on it. I work as a part of the marketing team. I connect with multiple teams in the organization. The company is headquartered in San Francisco but given the current situation, the entire team is remote. I get to use a lot of the concepts that I learned in my Marketing, Project Management, and Business Analytics courses.
Here’s what a day looks like:
9:30 am: I start my day looking at the data from the past few days to understand how
user engagement has been on the app. There was a steep learning curve as I started
working on this role. I had to get myself familiarized with querying to extract data
and then analyze them. I set up a weekly process for myself to look at the metrics
that would matter for the product at this stage. My week generally starts with this.
10:30 am: Following this, I create a quick to-do list for the day. Being a startup in its early stages, the goals and priorities evolve every week. I create my tasks to align with the weekly goals.
11:30 am: I report to the founder / CEO of the company. Around mid-morning, I connect with him to check-in. I give my updates and get his feedback on what I’m working on. This conversation generally gives me direction on what I’m working on and helps me align my priorities if there’s anything else that is pressing to attend to.
12:00 pm: Around mid-day, I connect with the Ambassadors (more like GISTs’ sales team) through our internal slack channel. I have also been working on user research and the conversation with the ambassadors helps me with that. I take a break for lunch around 1:30. I generally make a quick sandwich or a rice bowl and eat that while watching random videos on Instagram.
2:30 pm: Post lunch, I work on anything that I can do by myself. Since I do a lot of re-engagement activities for the users on the app, I spend this time working on that. This involves understanding user behavior, coming up with ideas on how to engage, and tracking the performance of the re-engagement activity after a day. This task generally changes based on the week’s goals.
4:30 pm: I spend some time on the user research by consolidating the data that I received from ambassadors. User research on a specific set of users is an activity that I do for a few days or a week, so I try to spend at least an hour on it each day.
5:30 pm: Since the tech team works from India, I wrap up my day with any communication that has to go to that team. I connect with the tech team at least a couple of times a week on a call at night.
I have always overestimated how much I can do in a day and try really hard to cover everything on my to-do list. However, working from home for this long has made me realize the importance of keeping time aside for myself and to not let work consume the entire day. I try to wrap up work around 6 pm and head out for a walk/run at 6:30 pm. This is one routine that has kept me sane during this quarantine. I also love to unwind by cooking dinner on most of the days.
Being an intern at GIST has been a great experience so far and I’m grateful for all the learning opportunities.
