Gabe Montoya received a Startup Internship Award this summer to intern at former VIP company BioBots, founded by Danny Cabrera ENG’14 and Ricky Solorzano ENG’13.
I first found out about BioBots in the introduction class to my bioengineering major, BE100. The founders, Danny Cabrera and Ricky Solorzano, came in to talk to us about their application of bioengineering: 3D bioprinting.
Amy Wang received a Startup Internship Award this summer to intern at former VIP company LocalAventura, founded by Andrea Vidler WG’15, Eugena Brown WG’15, and Cait Breslin C’15. Read a blog post about LocalAventura here.
In finding options for summer internships, all I knew was that I wanted to experience a little bit of everything, thereby hopefully learning more about what I wanted to do. As a rising sophomore, it was expectedly difficult to find companies who would even talk to me, let alone hire me.
Kmerpad is a small startup based in Yaoundé, Cameroon with a progressive social agenda and an innovative business model; they employ local women to sew washable menstrual pads, sell them and use the revenue to provide reproductive health education to vulnerable communities throughout the country. I worked for Kmerpad this summer as a Strategy Intern.
Gina Alm and fellow intern Michelle White W’17 at work.
I graduated from Wharton undergrad in May 2016 with concentrations in Management and Global Innovation. For the past eight months, I have worked as Chief Operating Officer of AccessNow, a web and mobile platform that crowdsources accessibility information for people with impaired mobility on an interactive map.
And I’ve done it in Canada.
Leah Davidson with Maayan Ziv, Founder of AccessNow, at Venture Preview Night in Google’s Toronto office
Mary Whiting received a Startup Internship Award this summer to intern at #WhartonGrad-founded startup WeTrain.
My experience at WeTrain has been energizing! I started my journey with WeTrain in January of 2016 and have loved seeing the company grow and succeed ever since. WeTrain was co-founded by Jonathan Sockol, who graduated from Wharton with an MBA this spring. This summer I was fortunate to be one of their full-time interns, working on a variety of projects and learning how to expand a small business into a successful enterprise.
Evangeline Giannopoulos received a Startup Internship Award this summer to intern at startup Negative Underwear.
This past summer, I was a Customer Insights Intern at Negative Underwear (Negative).
I quite fortuitously discovered Negative. During the school year, I was a campus ambassador for another start-up called LOLA, similarly a company founded by women, for women. I loved my experience working with LOLA. Largely due to the fact that it is a start-up, I felt how the LOLA founders and employees are extremely passionate about their work, an aura which was great to work within. Since at the time LOLA had only launched a few months previously, I really enjoyed the ownership over our work and influence that we ambassadors had on the company. Finally, I appreciated the ability to work extremely closely with and get to know employees from all levels of the company, including the co-founders.
The three summer interns (Grace – left, Evangeline (me) – middle, Rachel – right) in the office
I left my first job in Bain’s Toronto office three years ago bright-eyed and ready for change. I’d followed the traditional path from undergraduate business school to consulting and felt ready to take a big risk. Sure, I liked my time in consulting, but I had dreams of that perfect job out there. The problem was that I had no idea what perfect really meant. So, I applied to wildly different jobs across the world – from nonprofit to tech, from San Francisco to Thailand.
Over the past year, I interned at two very different companies: a medical device startup that I interned at part-time at Penn, and OXO, who make carefully designed cooking tools and housewares, that I interned at this summer. These experiences highlighted for me what I truly value in a company.
Barn Owl LLC was the last place I imagined myself working this summer. Yet, here I am in scenic Colorado Springs, slogging away from 8 to 6 in a downtown coworking space.
Josh and me at the ranching trade show in Steamboat Springs, CO
By Alex Kubo WG’17, Marketing & Demand Generation Intern at Andela
Sitting at my in-laws’ kitchen table, on and off Google Hangouts for hours, was not how I pictured my first day on the job. Then again, how could I have known what life at a startup would be like? I spent five years before joining the Wharton community working as an engineer in the petroleum and petrochemical industry for one of the largest publicly traded companies in the world. My former employer had systems for systems and regimented work processes for nearly every task. I painfully remember all too well having eight occurrences of the same “alignment” meeting over the course of ten months leading up to a project with a two-week execution window. “Action-oriented” was not a term heard frequently, let alone embraced. Yet there I was, a year after leaving big oil, diving headfirst into the startup world—albeit from the confines of middle-of-nowhere Connecticut—while the startup I had just kicked off with was relocating offices.