Intern at Best Buy and Kohls
Grad Year: May 2020
Major: Retail Merchandising (College of Design) and Strategic Communication
With which organization did you intern?
Best Buy Corporate, Social Media Marketing Intern (Summer 2018) and Kohl’s Corporate, Search Engine Optimization Intern (Summer 2019).
Where is it located?
Best Buy is headquartered in Richfield, Minnesota and Kohl’s is headquartered in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin.
How did you find out about the internship?
Best Buy: When I was a freshman here at the U, one of the student groups I was involved in toured Best Buy’s Corporate Campus and I fell in love with the culture, and opportunities for growth. I continued to look for internship postings online, and applied in the spring of my sophomore year.
Kohl’s: I’ve met several Kohl’s Early Talent recruiters throughout my freshman and sophomore years at networking events and career fairs. Through these interactions, I was invited to attend their Sophomore Career Expo, where sophomores from across the country travel to Kohl’s corporate campus to learn about internships and full-time positions. While there I met people who worked at Kohl’s, previous interns, and learned about how to apply. If you attended the expo, you were automatically moved past the first round of interviews for internships. Fast forward to the following fall, I was interviewing for the position and accepted in October for the summer internship.
What were your responsibilities?
While at Best Buy, I was on the Social Media Marketing team, specializing in the computing category. On a daily basis, I was working cross-functionally with Best Buy’s category partners to post on Best Buy’s “Deal of the Day” Twitter handle, as well as vet potential influencers for various Back to School social media campaigns for Intel/Microsoft and Dell. Over the entire summer, I worked with other interns on a comprehensive deep dive into the opportunities and benefits of Best Buy integrating User Generated Content into their social channels as a way to live out the recently re-branded company slogan of “Let’s Talk About What’s Possible.”
At Kohl's I was on the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) team, where we were faced with optimizing Kohls.com pre-holiday, to increase our organic rank on Google for basic product searches. On a daily basis, I was working on the back end of Kohls.com by canonicalizing duplicative links for high search and high performing product categories. Additionally, I completed key work research to determine which phrases and words should be included in product page copy blocks to increase rank over time. Other marketing interns and I also worked on several media plans to introduce new brand lines to Kohl’s, throughout the summer and presented to leadership.
What did you most enjoy?
Both Best Buy and Kohl’s have incredible corporate cultures that make work fun and exciting and both places I always looked forward to going to every day. Kohl’s and Best Buy also do a fantastic job of hosting interns over the summer and planned weekly intern events like Twins/Brewers games, happy hours, executive speakers, networking opportunities, and more.
What is something that you learned from your internship experience?
At Best Buy, I learned the value of being friendly, supportive, and as helpful as possible with cross-functional partners. The social team interacted with our agency, brand partners, category partners, and our creative team. There was always a lot of eyes on the work the social team did, and it was so much easier to work together and streamline process when everyone was excited and more than happy to help.
At Kohl’s on the SEO team, I learned that the smallest changes on a website as large as Kohl’s, make huge differences in the world of search. I was able to see through software reporting and organic search results on Google, the impact I was having on business by canonicalizing links, and adding in strategic keywords to copy blocks. I loved seeing the whole problem-solving process, from identifying our issues and goals, to strategizing, executing our ideas, and reporting on how they drove traffic to leadership. I also learned that for me personally, I get energy from seeing the physical impact of my work, and am driven by the strategically solving problems.
How will the internship help you in your future studies/ career?
I met some fantastic people at Best Buy, and I really invested in learning as much as I could about as many people as I could. I’m currently back at Best Buy now as a Contract Worker on the same team I interned on, helping out with some projects pre-holiday.
When it comes to SEO, there are few ways to gain knowledge in the field other than just “doing it” and experiencing it in a role. Walking onto the Kohl's team was very difficult, as I had little to no knowledge on SEO, coding, or the attribution process of a department store’s website. My internship with Kohl’s will help me in the future when I walk into the next role where I feel in over my head but in reality, it just takes time to learn.
What’s one piece of advice you would give other students about securing an exciting internship?
I would tell students who are looking for internships now to be open to new experiences and don’t underestimate the value of what you bring to the table, even just for an internship. (And when you land the internship, say “yes” as much as possible. People love the enthusiasm and a “can do” attitude!)
