Category: Professional Experience

In the Fall of 2016, I had the honor of working as a small  business consultant with the Lehigh Consulting Group, a student-run pre-professional organization on campus. Working with the Small Business Development Center for Lehigh University, my team and I got the chance to work with a local company working in the specialty food industry.

Working directly with the founder to address their needs, our group created a new branding strategy for our client. The new approach focused on online and social media marketing, creating a conversion plan for brick and mortar customers to become online buyers, and increasing customer retention. We also conducted an in-depth risk analysis looking at a private labeling move the client was considering to support their decision.

Getting to work on an engagement with a real client was a major learning experience. This was especially true for working with my team where I was the only pure business student; working through problems our client presented from my team members’ perspectives as engineers gave me a different perspective on problem solving and has helped me to further refine my approach to a challenge.

Five months later, I am proud to announce that our client has actually been employing strategies we created with them to continued success.

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From June 2016 through December 2016, I worked as an Innovation Development intern for Crowdplsr, Inc., a SAAS startup that offers a web app that allows event organizers to crowdfund upcoming events in order to test market demand for events, provide better for customer wants, and ensure profitability on shows that they put together.

While many of my friends were working in corporate offices in major companies, I was working as part of a bare bones early stage firm with 5 members running the whole operation: a CEO, a CIO, a CFO, a COO, and myself, the intern. Working one on one with the CEO, George Richie, was a great learning experience, getting to talk about strategy, planning, securing venture capital, and advancing the firm with the founder himself on a daily basis.

Working in such an early stage company, my roles were not defined by department, but by whatever was needed. I worked generating leads, emailing and calling potential customers to sell to them, managing social media accounts and scheduling applications, generating social media content, and maintaining a customer relationship management database to track sales data. I also developed the official Crowdplsr social media strategy, and co-drafted the first Crowdplsr New Customer Onboarding Guide. Through that time, I maintained a sales record above my quota, and increased Twitter and Facebook impressions by over 100% on each platform, and streamlined social media management by introducing scheduling and analytics SAAS tools to the social media strategy.

This internship gave me serious practical skills: learning to sell by doing, sending hundreds of emails and making hundreds of sales calls; learning to generate leads; learning strategy directly from a CEO in the middle of growing an early stage company, and many more. I cannot thank the Crowdplsr team enough for taking me on as an intern and for teaching me so much.

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Over the summer of 2015, I worked as a Product Development Fellow at Launchbay C creating The Sensay, a product to scientifically determine expiration of meat products as a food safety and food waste minimization tool, developing a product from the ground up and a business plan to launch it. This was an incredible experience to get hands-on, taking an idea from a thought to a tangible product, and inspired me to pursue entrepreneurial ventures in class and outside.

My partner, Brianna Riggs (Class of 2018, Marketing, Finance), and I came up with the idea for the product after she had suffered from a case of food poisoning and started thinking of a definitive way to identify unsafe foods to eat. After looking into several approaches, our final product was based around an ergonomic 3D printed appliance housing a colometric polymer that changes color when it interacts with compounds that are created when meat products rot. We focused on meat products since they are food products that are the most dangerous to eat when they are not fresh.

Development was a real challenge, especially as two business school students with no experience in 3D design, CAD, or materials science — all of which were key to creating our final deliverable. We taught ourselves Solidworks and learned how to use Ulitmaker 3D printers from our mentors to create a tangible 3D printed housing for the testing element. We also couldn’t have created our final prototype without Professor Jedlicka in Materials Science who helped us develop and finally create a polymer that would react and clearly show indicate when a meat product was unsafe to eat, walking us through its creation in her lab. We cannot thank our mentors enough.

As part of the Launchbay C program, we finished our summer by pitching our prototype and business plan to venture capitalists. While we did not secure an investment, we learned an immense amount from preparing a real venture capital proposal.

That summer changed the game for me. It showed me what I wanted to do with my life in academia and beyond — working on creating new ideas and products and solving problems to create value.

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