Why interning at a startup is way better than a big corporation.
By: Hojip Jeon
Tags: Hiring, Internships, Marketing, Technology, Startup

Why interning at a startup is way better than a big corporation.

Don’t be too quick to judge an internship opportunity at a startup. You have no idea how much you’ll learn coming out of it. Hojip Jeon Jun 8·4 min read

Photo by Leon on Unsplash

At startups there are less people, so you take on more responsibility, allowing you to do more impactful work, which ultimately helps you learn immensely about your job and the industry you’re in. It’s as simple as that. It’s like when you’re in a group project with 5 people versus 30 people. In the end, however, it depends on what’s more important to you: the label of “intern at [famous company]” and the recognition that gets OR knowing how to actually do marketing, financial analytics, sales, etc.

That’s really it. If you want to read about how I came to this conclusion… wow, that’d be great, thanks!

As kids we’re always taught — almost programmed—that working for those big name corporations is the goal. It stressed me out to see my peers and friends get those big internships that led to even bigger first jobs, while I was still struggling to get my foot in the door for an interview. However, I think a big part of it had to do with my less adequate grades.

Fortunately, thanks to a very generous friend, I was able to get a phone interview on a Saturday with my, now former, boss at a Korean tech company. I think I was desperate after a series of rejections because I remember telling him, “Whatever you need me to do, I’ll do it.” Within days I got hired to work on content marketing, yet once I sat down, I learned that we didn’t even have a proper marketing team.

Because it was a tech startup, the CEO wasn’t too focused on marketing just yet, and poured a lot of his resources into hiring the best engineers and buying the best equipment for them. The good news was, we had the products. Now all we had to do was plan and implement a strategy. With a newly developed SDK and API, my fellow interns and I created a landing page via Notion to introduce a beta program for the SDK, hoping to get software developers, and alike, to sign up and use the product. We polished the website, published it with an analytics tracker, and then ran a month long Google Search Ad campaign to increase traffic.

Running that ad campaign taught me more about how to plan, customize, and publish an ad than any advertising or marketing class at university did. There’s only so much you can study, but you really won’t understand it until you do it. This process also forced me to study SDKs and APIs, allowing me to not only know what they are, but how to also sell them.

Three months later, we officially hired our Head of Marketing. By the end of her first week, she had reorganized the company’s entire value offering and strategized a plan to market our technology, products, and solutions. I learned a lot from that one presentation on how to set up a marketing plan for a business. When you’re at a big corporation that’s already been established for a long time, you don’t get to see how everything began. You don’t get to see the reasoning behind a certain product line’s naming and branding, or why product A is heavily marketed at expos and trade shows while product B is advertised through digital marketing. Apologies that this is so focused on marketing.

With her plan in mind, she tasked me to research and create a Go-to-market strategy, content marketing strategy, and campaign ideas for one of our solutions that had already entered the US market. Creating those from scratch and getting weekly feedback from the expert, pointing me in the right direction, taught me everything you need to consider when assembling a marketing strategy. So the question you also want to ask yourself is this: Do you want to learn by creating something yourself? or by filling in the blanks of someone else’s framework? I believe that to be that star candidate you need to know how to do the job you’re applying for better than your competitor, and there’s no better way to learn than to create something yourself.

Another huge perk for interning at a startup is that you get to be part of that OG crew. Imagine that you intern at a small tech startup that changes the way people buy coffee and it replaces Starbucks (Starbucks will probably buy that startup IRL). That’s something you can be proud about, and if you have maintained the good relationships you made while you were there, that’s an opportunity to join the team once again. If you interned at a startup that didn’t survive, at least you have the insider scoop on what went wrong — and that’s even more valuable knowledge! Either way, it’s a win-win, and I learned in economics and game theory that that is rare.

In conclusion, startups are a great environment for an intern because of the impactful work you’ll do, knowledge you’ll gain, and friends you’ll make. I know we live in a society today that’s always chasing the big labels, working for places like Apple, Google, and even Popeye’s (best chicken there is). But those are the big fish. And if you’re like me, someone with not a lot of experience and impressive grades, startups give you a lot of practice with small fish, better preparing you for that big fish. So next time when you’re scrolling through jobs on Linkedin or other sites, don’t be too quick to judge a startup internship because you’ll definitely learn more than at a big corporation.