A Jelly for the summer

When I was searching for a job this summer I was utterly lost. I was without an official major nor a clue about what exact type of work I was passionate about. All I knew was that I didn’t want to work in my little hometown every day.

After deciding that I wanted to work in San Francisco, I interviewed for all different kinds of internships, from organizing private children’s cooking classes to managing social media for a food delivery service.

Jellyfish was my last stop on a whirlwind tour of start-up offices in the Financial District, but as I sat down and learned more about the company, it began to set itself apart from its Clif Bar-filled, single-origin coffee-fueled tech counterparts.

It became clear to me that Jellyfish was going to be a place where I could learn, and as a college student searching for clues about how to survive post-grad, that was all I really wanted. 

What was I getting into?

Though my school is advanced in a number of fields, digital marketing is not one of them. There is no course offered that instructs students on how to use the Google Marketing Platform, so when I learned that I would be mainly assisting the analytics team, I was nervous to say the least.

Thankfully, it seemed like I was not the first person to come into the Jellyfish office with incredibly limited experience using that digital suite. On my first day I was given access to the modules offered through the company’s training program, the aptly named Jellyfish Academy, and I spent my first week attending these Jellyfish-specific classes while also taking online Google Analytics courses; the school-like format was familiar and incredibly comforting given that everything else about this new job was brand new to me.

In many ways, my first week at Jellyfish was a lot like my first week of freshman year: I was beginning to spend every day in a place that was different from anything I had experienced before and none of the faces around me were familiar, so it forced me to find my footing in this foreign environment, make friends, and wrap my head around an entirely new style of learning as fast as possible so I could start contributing. 

What I worked on

That all being said, the transition was much easier than I expected. To be perfectly honest, I was expecting to mostly be grabbing coffee and scheduling meetings, an experience similar to what an extra on Silicon Valley might portray. Thankfully, that couldn’t be farther from the truth.

I was quickly invited to join meetings, contribute to actual accounts, and create presentations that were presented to clients. While it still seems sometimes like everyone is using a foreign language in some of these meetings, every single person is so willing to answer questions after the fact that I just soak up what I can and follow up quickly after.

The internship experience here is immersive, and because of the size of the San Francisco office and the fact that everyone is in such close quarters, I have been able to expand beyond just the analytics team and help out in other areas as well.

I learned how to streamline account information on both Salesforce and Google Marketing Platform, researched product information for Hoka (a global running shoe company), and created audiences on Display & Video 360 for Uber. 

What I’m taking with me

My experience as an intern at Jellyfish has been more educational than I could have ever expected, and it came with rich exposure to a field that I was virtually unfamiliar with before I began. Because I was given the opportunity to learn about all the aspects of Jellyfish’s business I feel as though I was offered a peek behind a giant internet curtain, and can not only understand all of the ways that companies target consumers, but am also more educated about how my online presence informs what I see, what I buy, and how I am viewed by these internet giants. 

For those interested in Jellyfish and looking for an internship or a full-time position, check out our career page to find out more about what it’s like to work here.