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College Success

Forté’s Undergraduate Internships: An Inside Look

Undergraduate interns are a valuable part of the Forté team. They help us connect with our college audience, communicate with campus ambassadors, and develop innovative ideas to expand our reach. Forté has a fully remote team, so we look for interns who are organized, self-motivated, and driven to support our mission. For insights on what it’s like to intern at Forté, we interviewed two recent interns, Kacey Wood and Anna Li Radcliffe.

Kacey Wood, Marketing Intern

Kacey is graduating from Indiana University (Kelley School of Business) with a bachelor’s degree in Information Systems and Business Analytics. During her freshman year, she heard about Forté and signed up for our newsletter, where she saw the internship listed. She worked with Forté as a marketing intern from August 2018 to May 2021. She says, “It was a great learning experience, because I got to venture into an area that I wasn’t necessarily studying.”

Kacey says, “My job as an intern was helping with marketing and grassroots outreach so that women across the entire nation were familiar with the Forté conferences.” In 2019, she attended the College to Business Leadership Conference in Chicago. This came in handy during her internship — she was able to draw on her conference experience to brainstorm ways to move Forté’s undergraduate conferences virtual in 2020.

It was a great learning experience, because I got to venture into an area that I wasn’t necessarily studying.

 
Kacey worked closely with Kristin Coleman, Forté’s Marketing Manager for Pre-MBA and MBA programs. Because Kacey had a background in data and felt comfortable using Excel, Kristin often assigned her data projects. Kacey says, “Instead of having a designated number of hours per week, my work was project-based, and I would have about five to 10 projects a semester.”

As an example of the type of project she worked on, she said, “I started looking at the type of woman that would apply to Forté programs, making graphs, and organizing the data. I would create presentations for the marketing team so they could understand who we attract and how to change our marketing efforts.”  Kacey is interested in a career in consulting, and she appreciated that her marketing internship included a variety of tasks. She said, “It’s like having a consulting internship, because you’re put on so many different projects, and you meet so many different people.”

What’s next for Kacey? “I’m going to be a technology consultant FSO for Ernst and Young in New York. FSO means financial service organizations, so I’ll be doing technology consulting for banks, which is really cool.”

Anna Li Radcliffe, Undergraduate Programs Intern

Anna Li Radcliffe majored in Finance and Business Analytics and minored in Mathematics at Indiana University (Kelley School of Business). She interned with Forté from February 2020 to May 2021. She connected with Forté through the 2018 College to Business Leadership Conference in New York, and our mission of empowering women in business really resonated with her. She says, “It’s close to my heart. That’s definitely something that helps motivate me to do the best job I can.”

It was really cool to be in a position where my voice was actually heard.

 
As Forté’s undergraduate programs intern, Anna Li worked on pre-conference planning, post-conference summaries, centralizing the Forté Campus Ambassadors program, and matching Career Ready Certificate earners with mentors, among other projects. She also helped create a trial version of a Forté podcast. Since she was balancing her internship with a full schedule of college classes, she appreciated the flexible hours. She typically checked her Forté email during the day and worked on projects that weren’t time-sensitive at night.

Anna Li believes the internship helped develop her soft skills, including communicating with colleagues, managing expectations, and sharing ideas. It also gave her opportunities to sharpen her Excel and PowerPoint skills and learn how to use Canva. She says, “Being able to practice with them has been super helpful.”

Anna Li reported to Nicole Gwanzura and Megan McMahon, Program Managers at Forté. She says, “Something that surprised me when I first started was how open Nicole was to hearing my ideas, and running with it if it was a good idea. It was really cool to be in a position where my voice was actually heard.”

What’s next for Anna Li? “I’ll be starting full time in New York City as an investment banking analyst at Rothschild and Co.”

Advice for Future Interns

What would Kacey and Anna Li tell other undergrads who are considering an internship at Forté? “Go into it with open ears,” Kacey says. “Adapt to the way that they run things, because you’ll really learn a lot by doing that.”

Anna Li says, “You really get out of it what you put in. You can just do what’s assigned, but going that extra mile and brainstorming and taking advantage of the opportunity is definitely something that’s benefited me a lot.”

Interested in an undergraduate internship at Forté? Contact our college team at college@fortefoundation.org.

 

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