chronological order past -> present

where i started.

I grew up very lucky and very privileged. My parents provided for me academically, culturally, and financially; so when I came to college, I was incredibly daunted by the scope and difficulties of joining the professional community. I would also like to acknowledge how lucky I was to never had worked a retail or service job - I know those roles are extremely difficult and taxing.

NYU Stern itself is a particularly careerist environment. In my first semester of school I was introduced to dramatic job titles like investment banking analyst, forensic accountant, and product manager. These were things I had never heard of, never met anyone who had worked in those function. The spring of my freshman year in 2020 was also the spring that the COVID-19 pandemic hit. All at once, NYU students rushed back home or locked down for dormitory quarantine. I was very blessed to head home to Georgia to comfortably quarantine with my family. In that time, however, I realized that my first work experience ever would be virtual, and that it would be changing the way I learned. My sister, who had just started her first full-time job, was in a similarly strange position. So I scrambled online through websites likle Angel List, Handshake, and Linkedin, scrounging for any opportunities that were taking freshmen. And one of them bit! Thus I had my first work experience at an up-and-coming pre Series A startup. more on that now.

While I was in my search, I was completing an on-campus mentorship program at the NYU Stern Strategic Venture Society. As a Venture Team Analyst, I got my first taste of preparing investment decks, conducting due diligence, and experimenting with things like Python, Figma, and DCFs. I've attached my (first ever!) work samples to show you've what I've learned from all that jazz.

Ghost Kitchens Industry Report

Very Good Security Growth Equity Pitch

Kencko Early Stage Pitch

Online Apparel Industry Analysis

Stix Due Diligence Exercise

please take a look!

where i'm (hopefully) going.

Certainly, a lot of this is based on who gives me a job! but some of the things I'm interested in are things like fintech, consumer goods, and venture. I think one of the things really makes me excited is working through strategy. I teach a mentorship program for the strategic venture society now, called Startup Studio, where I go over a few high level strategic elements of a startup with a group of students. They end up pitching their own idea to us and how they'd handle the big questions: product-market fit, monetization strategy, go-to-market strategy. It really excites me to work through the incentives of each part of the business model, and how or if they work together. That's what I'm hopefully looking forwards to. Some kind of venture studio or even idea incubator. I'd love to be able to work across new concepts but get deep enough to establish something. Just a thought!

restaurant sales intern @ sharebite.

remote, company based in New York, NY. june 2020 - july 2020.

This was it! My first time working. It was also a fantastic dive into the deep end of sales, something that still spooks many an experienced employee. I would say that the three most valuable things I learned from this particular experience were: how to ask for feedback and give feedback, how to hold my ground in a professional setting, and how to take the intiative. While those three things are somewhat obvious, for a first-time professional, I learned so much.

Firstly, in "asking and giving feedback". I signed up for two performance reviews during my two months, but I also constantly workshopped with my manager. While I disagreed in some ways with how feedback was given, I realized that the best solution to get over my discomfort with being on the phone, doing cold calls, was to accept the feedback and try to internalize it. It's not like tennis practice anymore. The cold calls and sales I was closing were critical to the national expansion project at Sharebite at the time. Understanding and adapting the feedback to make it work for me, really improved my experience. In giving feedback, I took notice of how I felt when I accepted feedback and tried to tailor around those feelings.

Secondly, I learned how to hold my ground! When making cold calls, especially to tired and worn-out customers like restaurant owners during the pandemic, I faced many a frustrated decision maker. That's okay - the restaurant industry is totally the ones screwing with their business model. But being on the end of that frustration was hard to stomach, especially for a young 17/18 year old. Getting used to that and successfully working against it made me really proud.

Lastly, this experience taught me to go out and try. I got the internship by cold-emailing the contact on Handshake. I started a coffee chat rotation because I saw the feedback in our intern group chats and acted on it. I got to speak across the company because I set aside time for it. There really are so many opportunities if you just ask for them. This is something that I realized I was never taught growing up. Instead, I was taught to work hard, which is fair, but I realize now that the best combination is probably she who is both hardworking and ambitious.

investment research intern @ recharge capital

remote, company based in New York, NY. august 2020 - december 2020.

My second internship experience was when I decided to take a gap semester from school. As it was during the pandemic, virtual school during all the difficulties was the least appealing thing to me. Once I found this internship, I got to work and subletted a small apartment in New York. I was fascinated by this internship - I worked both in some investment diligence and in the incubator function, working directly with founders. While I was a part of the team, Recharge Capital was still focused on consumer living startups and products. As a young student, these were definitely the deals that I could provide the most insight and experience in. But over time, I started wanting to do more and do different. I think this is where I got my itch for more complex, B2B tech products. As most VCs ask, what products do the builders need?

revenue operations intern @ pendo.io

remote, company based in Raleigh, NC. june 2021 - july 2021.

This internship took place over the summer following my sophmore year, virtually from New York, NY. At this point I had gotten some sense that I didn't want to work in investment banking, though I did take a few interviews here and there (no offers :(). I didn't quite konw enough to want to work in big tech, and accounting/consulting were both out of the picture for me. Thus, startups were the right fit.

However, I wanted to try something VERY different from both Sharebite and Recharge Capital. Pendo at the time was a Series E company, backed by some impressive venture firms. I wasn't too sure about the role itself, but as I met the hiring manager and other members of the team, I realized how vital an operations function was. As I started working, I found it really interesting to apply myself to the goal of making sales more effective. I learned about the Salesforce CRM, Leandata plugins, onboarding tools and processes, and the importance of good documentation. I have never been so obsessed with documentation as when I left this internship: what a glory it is to be neat!

I did leave this internship early for personal reasons. But, the team at Pendo was so absolutely sweet and understanding of the things that were going on in my personal life. They were wonderful and incredibly patient.

product innovation summer analyst @ american express

hybrid, company based in New York, NY. june 2022 - august 2022.

My latest internship experience at AMEX was in the Global Consumer Services Group working under a product manager for international consumer line management products (proactive line increase, reactive line increase). While there, I had the opportunity to shadow discovery and clarifying calls with other PMs, meet strategy and marketing professionals, and present to other interns and senior leadership within my team. I also picked up valuable skills like SQL (through Hive Terminal) and Excel dashboard design.

My two projects for the summer were (1) a proposal for marketing reinforcements experiment and proposal plan and (2) a performance and engagement metrics Excel summary for senior leadership. For the first project, I put together a short deck to present to our international marketing and design teams to explain how and why a marketing reinforcement after the product engagement would be useful. The logic was, if we remind people that their credit limit has increased, they will probably spend more. Our question for the experiment was, how long should we wait to send that reminder? And how often (once or twice)? I received draft templates from three teams and also coded SQL sorting for the experiment execution through our internal marketing campaign system.

My second project took a lot more time. I selected, interpreted, and coded for through SQL for 30+ metrics through AMEX's vast databases. I learned SQL this summer from the ground up, which was interesting (and stressful at times). I then devised a way that would hopefully "automate" the data pull as much as possible - once a month, someone could run the data on the most recent month's performance and copy/paste the table over into Excel, which would then map to a more digestible and visual-first way (I included time series graphs). This project definitely tested me more - how fast could I learn, how effectively could I ask questions. But I'm glad I did it anyways.