Going in to my internship at April Bell Research Group (ABRG), I didn’t know what to expect. I liked that ABRG was part of a Women in Business (WIB) cohort in Dallas because as an Economics and Math major, I see myself in business. What I didn’t know was how interning at a Marketing Research boutique agency would correlate with my strengths, interests, and plans for the future.
What I discovered during my internship with ABRG is that I had found a place to combine my strengths with the company’s values, and it was a great experience!
Learning for Growth
“Learning to grow” was one of the values practiced continuously at ABRG, and I was lucky enough to be a part of applying this learning process.
Specifically, many of the projects I worked on this summer involved growing ABRG’s online presence. They included the following:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO increases your ranking and visibility in Search Engines, predominantly Google. I learned and executed my learnings about SEO on ABRG’s website in hopes of propelling ABRG’s online presence.
Affiliate Linking
April and her team enjoy sharing with other women, small businesses, researchers, etc. what they have learned. And many online resources encourage sharing by creating a way to earn a small commission for services and products they believe in. Her favorite affiliate to share is Asian Efficiency’s productivity content– specifically their Ritual Course has been the backbone of a lot of the team’s growth over the last year.
Online Courses
ABRG has been asked by researchers the past few years to teach specific moderating and facilitation skills. I worked on researching the technical ins-and-outs of creating an online course so that when the time comes, ABRG can move forward with launching a successful course for researchers!
“Pit Crew” Teamwork
It’s clear that April & co. work well together as a team. They often refer to themselves as a “pit crew”! The company-wide effort to re-do ABRG’s website this summer involved a lot of teamwork. Everyone’s strengths were utilized for different parts of this project and we relied on each other to understand the bigger picture. The video below is the inspiration behind how ABRG aspires to work together in the most efficient manner.
This Summer, teamwork looked like:
- Being OK with Not Knowing
- Sometimes asking for help is hard, but I found it beneficial to our overall goal because I learned more when I asked. This new definition of teamwork – the one open to asking for direction – has reframed my thinking about asking questions and given me a new perspective on collaboration.
- Getting Unstuck Together
- A lot of the online work I learned about was not only new to me but also to ABRG. When none of us knew how to do something or what to do next, we brainstormed. This helped me because it provided direction to move forward. Recognizing that being “stuck” is part of the process to move forward early on this summer helped me be successful at ABRG.
- Meeting Participation
- Having everyone else’s perspective as well as my own at our meetings helped move along projects effectively and efficiently. Thus, teamwork is also about being open to other’s perspectives AND offering my own ideas, which helps a project be as successful as it can be.
ABRG utilized teamwork to raise the bar on what it could do for its new website and yielded successful results.
The projects I worked on this summer had many values instilled within them. The values of “learning to grow” and “pit crew teamwork” have taken on new meanings for me and were key to the positive experience I had in my internship. Because these values were at the core of ABRG, they were also instilled my mindset and my work, and I feel like I flourished this summer.
By: Cecilia Esquivel, 2016 ABRG Summer Intern, Emory University