Kathia Hernandez

By Zoë Eitel
While working for DIM Events, Kathia Hernandez started off as an entrepreneurship intern and moved up to an intern manager position where she got experience she plans to use to launch her own company.
Kathia was in charge of using marketing strategies to make her clients’ visions for their companies come to life. She also oversaw a group of interns who worked together on graphics, one-pagers and event ideas for the clients.
“I would meet with clients and email them to make sure they loved what we were doing for their company,” she says.
Kathia found the DIM Events opportunity on Indeed after weeks of searching for the right fit. This internship appealed to her because the company creates meaningful events that bring people together and the position sounded like a great learning experience.
“I liked how the internship program seemed to be more like a mentorship program,” she says. “I could tell by the website’s internship tab that the company valued their interns and taught them a lot.”

Community Manager Intern at DIM Events

BSB Entrepreneurship 2022

Because of COVID-19, Kathia’s internship was remote, and DIM Events worked with their interns to make their workload manageable.
“The company made sure that interns would not get burned out by having a schedule around school times and working with the intern’s stress load,” Kathia says. “It was formatted to give us the tools we needed and the access to people we needed to learn and get the job done.”

“This scholarship helped me with achieving my goals in having an internship and being able to take the time to learn from a new experience without having to worry about working extra. Without the hands-on learning opportunity, I might have not taken my leap to start thinking about my own start-up.”

The only difference Kathia could see with working remotely was that it took a bit longer to learn some programs and the formats the company wanted the materials in. But the owner of the company would have meetings with department leaders to make sure everyone was getting answers to their questions. Kathia says this made everything run more smoothly and made it feel like everyone was still working together on a team, just in different spaces.
Along with utilizing DePaul career services such as resume review, career fairs and career advising, Kathia was able to receive the Internship Plus award through the Career Center for this unpaid internship to take some of the financial strain off of her shoulders.
“This scholarship helped me with achieving my goals in having an internship and being able to take the time to learn from a new experience without having to worry about working extra,” she says. “Without the hands-on learning opportunity, I might have not taken my leap to start thinking about my own start-up.”
Since finishing her internship at DIM Events, Kathia has started another remote internship at After School Matters, which appealed to her because of her passion for helping her community and love of volunteer work and being a youth leader.
She is also focused on using her education and what she learned from her internships to start her own company that she hopes to launch by the end of Spring 2021.
“I learned more about what it takes to build a start-up and how you are able to put your creativity and passion into anything you want,” Kathia says. “I learned the do’s and don’ts from this company’s perspective, and I believe this will help me with running my own company as well.”