My Internship at Drio

Hello! My name is Yifei Sun, and I’m from Shanghai. I’m a freshman at Johns Hopkins University, double majoring in Applied Math and Film Studies and minoring in marketing and communications. This semester, I had the opportunity to participate in Drio’s intern program.

As a freshman, this is my first internship in the U.S., so I was very nervous at first. However, my anxiety and nervousness were soon resolved by Drio’s family-like working environment. In this small start-up company, I got the valuable opportunity to work directly with the two co-founders of the company, Hazel and Rachael, who are kind, patient, caring, and easy to approach. They let me call them by their first name, value my opinion a lot during the discussion, and are always willing to teach me new things and allow me to make mistakes.

The project that I have worked on is a media kit for an organization founded by my boss, Monument Women’s Creative Alliance. It’s an important task because the kit will later be used to attract sponsorship. To do it, I first helped build member database and contacted all the members in the organization who have incomplete personal information. Then, I categorized them by industry and employment and used the member statistics in my project. At last, I started making the kit. I sent every draft to my boss and made modifications based on her feedback. As my first internship, I experience the systematic working process: being given a project, setting a deadline, doing research, and completing it, making improvements. More importantly, I learned three key lessons from this internship.

1. Be careful
I have been a very careless person who pays little attention to details. This leads to much trouble during my internship. For example, when making media kit, I made a lot of small mistakes such as typos and inconsistent fonts. My boss would always point something out for every draft I sent her. She would ask me to make everything consistent, symmetric, and faultless. She would notice detail such as slightly different spacing between subtitles and paragraphs and a period that I lack at the end of a sentence. This made me realize that preciseness is necessary while working, especially for a visual-art related field like graphic design. I should focus more on detail in the future. This meticulous, strict, and professional working attitude should accompany me no matter where I go.

2. Be tech-savvy
A crucial thing I learnt through this internship is the use of Canva, a well known graphic design website. It can not only make media kits, but also logos, infographics, presentations, etc. The first thing that my boss taught me after giving me the task is using Canva, which saved me countless hours searching for templates and DIYing everything. Also, the platform Mobilize visualizes the member statistics automatically. But I didn’t notice this feature before I had already spent days gathering all the data by hand. In future work, I’ll make better use of technology to improve efficiency.

3. Be honest
Last but not least, I want to mention a small detail happened during my internship. I once thought that advertisement is something that usually has some level of exaggeration. While putting the statistics on the kit, it would be more attractive and eye-catchy if the numbers are bigger. But my boss has never asked me to exaggerate a bit. She simply lets me write everything the way they are. I respect her honesty, and I believe this is a strong work ethic needed for any professionals, including me, in the future.

In conclusion, through this internship, I had a good experience and gained a lot of personal growth. I consider myself lucky to have this opportunity to work with Hazel and Rachael, and I believe the lessons I learned from this semester will benefit me for my whole life, whatever I do and wherever I go.