A day in my life working at Nortech this summer looked like many things. Somedays, the office was quiet, other days, it was loud while the entire office played bean bag toss. Somedays, I had meetings and talked to different departments. Somedays, I worked all day in my cubicle and only got up for lunch and the bathroom. Every day was different for me, from meetings to talking to new people and learning new things. Every day I got to experience something new, and I think that was the best part of my internship.
As a Digital Marketing Intern, I worked on a small team. Because of this, I had the chance to work on a multitude of different projects. My main points of learning consisted of digital marketing, looking at demand generation, SEO & content marketing, and marketing automation. As well as community marketing, through event planning, branding, and employee engagement. My last main learning point was market research, where I learned about different methods of research, sources, and objectives.
Every day was different for me, depending on the assignments I was working on during each sprint period. Usually every week, I had meetings with people that worked at Nortech to discuss specific clients Nortech has worked with. These meetings helped me write success stories and press releases on these projects. These meetings and stories were a big part of my job, seeing as I wrote a lot of Nortech’s blog posts. These meetings were usually conducted through Microsoft Teams because not everyone I talked to worked in the Maple Grove location. Some tasks I did almost every day consisted of emailing people, using Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Word, and Excel, talking with people in the office, posting and editing drafts on WordPress, and working on whatever assignments I had for that week.
The marketing team met every other week on Tuesdays for marketing work and prioritization meetings in the summer. We worked in sprints of two weeks, so when I was assigned tasks, I had two weeks to complete those assignments. During these meetings, we would go over the marketing roadmap and talk about the progress of different work items that were assigned to members of the team. During the fall quarter, I met with my supervisor every other week on Fridays to discuss upcoming projects, review past ones and give a run-down of any projects I was working on. These progress meetings helped me stay on track with my work and gave me the opportunity to ask any questions regarding the projects I was working on.
Typically after any meeting, I would make sure to write down any additional notes made in the meeting that would be helpful in the completion of an assignment. I would then check Sharepoint to double-check what I have been assigned before I started. For the summer and the fall quarter, mapping out my week and planning out what days I had time to work on assignments helped me navigate and control my schedule better. I learned a lot about time management in doing this especially, in the fall quarter while I had all my classes to balance on top of making sure I am completing my work for Nortech on time.
In the summer, I worked at the office located in Maple Grove. I went in every week Monday through Thursday, from 9-5. On Fridays, I worked from home and worked a half day. For the fall quarter, I worked from home and my hours were very flexible because of my classes. Due to Covid 19, many people from the Maple Grove office worked from home. Because of this typically the same people would come into the office every day in the summer. This allowed me to get to know the people that came in every day and network.
I went into my internship not knowing much about what a manufacturing company does. I had to quickly adjust and learn as much as I could so I could do well in my position. I had the chance to meet with so many different people and learn about what they do. Every week on Thursdays, in the summer, the interns had a meeting with one of the leaders at the company. We attended this meeting in person and had the opportunity to learn firsthand about their career path and how they got to where they are today. I can confidently say I now know more than I ever thought I would about how a manufacturing company internally operates and how important every department is in the fulfillment of a product. This experience opened me up to a new channel of marketing I was not sure I would enjoy, being business-to-business.
School and my education have helped me learn a lot about my passion for marketing, but my internship at Nortech has taught me far more than I could have ever asked for. From working on email campaigns, conducting market research, writing web content, developing a web page, writing press releases and success stories, event planning, brand building, and experiencing working in an office environment, this experience has been extremely rewarding. Now that my internship is coming to an end, I can confidently say that I have learned so many valuable skills. These skills range from communication, building a network, storytelling, design skills, time management, and most importantly navigating my marketing career. Because of how great interning at Nortech was for me, working with another B2B company in the future is 100% something I would do again.
