Reflecting on my Internship Experience at Rossum: Lea Shi
This blog post was written by our summer 2019 intern, Lea Shi who came all the way from Carnegie Mellon University to join our marketing team. We are very grateful for her dedication and hard work over the past few months and wish her all the best in her future studies and career!
Going into this internship, I was very nervous because, although I learned an abundance of skills from classes, I never acquired any practical skills in a field. I did well on all my exams and am fairly confident in my theoretical skills, but knowing how to do something is not quite the same as actually being able to do it. I saw my experience at Rossum as an opportunity to shift my “knows” into “being able tos” and exploring new fields.
Research
One of my first tasks was to research how Rossum and its competitors were positioned in the data extraction space. I assumed this would be relatively easy since I had conducted research through more than a decade of school. However, I soon realized that researching for a paper is like having tunnel vision in which the tunnel was provided; school always gave me the prompt and the sources I needed in order to complete the assignment.
Researching for a company is more like a chain of reactions where one source leads to another source, keyword or idea to look into. This type of research never stops because different prompts and sources arise and the answers and even the questions are always changing. Initially, I was overwhelmed with how much information was available, and on top of that I wasn’t even familiar with many of the terms being used. I began to take notes each day which became my cheat sheets and proved very useful as time went on.
Graphic design
After analyzing the marketing strategies of our competitors, I offered a variety of suggestions during my mid-internship meeting. We determined that the most viable idea was to better utilize social media as a marketing channel. Since we live in a society saturated by advertisements, my idea was to make our social media platforms more personal, mainly because people tend to follow accounts that create some sort of emotional connection rather than ones focused primarily on the benefits of a product.
My first task was to create quizzes and carousels for Rossum’s Twitter and LinkedIn. A major challenge in this task was to become familiar with the functions in Figma, our interface design tool. Although I had never taken any formal design courses or used any complex design tool like this before, I had images in my mind about how I wanted the posts to appear.
Using the industry vocabulary cheat sheet I mentioned before, I also created a glossary of relevant terms for Rossum to use in future social media and blog posts. I found that my experience with Figma reignited my interest in design and solidified my plan to pursue CMU’s HCII program.
Email Sequence
Another project that I worked on was email marketing. I started by researching the best practices for creating email sequences. After writing several drafts, we decided that performing an A/B test would be helpful in determining which types of emails are most effective.
The email sequence consisted of four emails that were sent automatically. Once the email campaign was complete, I analyzed the results and picked the best performing email, that we used to create a workflow.
Concluding the internship
Throughout this internship, I tried not to set too many expectations because I wanted to keep an open mind and absorb as much information as possible in a new and challenging environment. This led me to realize that I enjoy the creative process of taking an idea and turning it into something tangible that can generate insight and have a meaningful effect on its environment.
I also enjoyed the design process and plan to spend some of my free time learning more functions of Figma. I gained an incredible amount of knowledge about marketing;
Are you interested in getting hands-on experience in marketing? Feel free to contact rossum@rossum.ai with the subject line “Marketing Internship at Rossum”.