Outside, the sun shone on a brilliant spring Saturday in Evanston. Crowds of alumni and current students descended on Kellogg to celebrate Reunion, and several other groups were having fun with activities ranging from the Kentucky Derby to the Floyd Mayweather – Manny Pacquiao boxing “fight of the century” — and yet I was looking out over a room packed with first-year students analyzing market trends and sales data.
Few things are compelling enough to attract a group of MBA candidates away from such temptations, but I was thrilled to be part of organizing such an event, one that I hope will go on to become a Kellogg tradition: the inaugural Kellogg Marketing Club’s CPG Internship Boot Camp, presented by Kraft Foods.
The inspiration for part of this event occurred to my Kellogg Marketing Club colleague, Dan Rubin-Wills ’15, and me early on in our summer internships, which coincidentally were at Kraft. Together, Dan and I are the co-vice presidents of career preparation for the club, so we are responsible for developing and running programs that help Kellogg students hone their resumes for marketing positions, prepare for interviews and dominate their internships. Thus, sitting together in a summer training for Nielsen — a research tool that is the backbone of marketing departments at CPG firms nationwide — Dan and I saw an opportunity to bring exposure for this critical knowledge to Kellogg’s students during the academic year, so that our interns could hit the ground running even faster (a summer internship is the quickest way to spend 10 weeks I have ever encountered).
Once we learned that Kraft had approached Kellogg about developing a workshop on internship preparedness, Dan and I jumped at the chance to facilitate what would become so much more than a Nielsen primer, but rather an intensive learning experience for Kellogg first-years about to embark on internships.