marketing internship with ASUCI

joining college gave me several opportunities to delve further into the business field, and the main areas of focus for me were sales and marketing. having come in with a greater inclination towards marketing, my main goal throughout my freshman year at UCI was to do an internship in marketing. in my winter quarter, i came across the perfect opportunity to join my school's student body elections as a marketing intern. under the larger student government---Associated Students of the University of California in Irvine (ASUCI)---i was onboarded to the 2024 Elections Commission!

one of our main goals was to increase our student voting rates since, historically, UCI has always had incredibly low voter turnout. this meant creating an attractive theme for the elections to motivate voters to show up and invite friends, as well! after much deliberation, we decided to emulate our 2024 Election off of Taylor Swift's Eras tour because it appealed to a large population and perfectly matched with the social trends at that time. 

the next step was creating the actual campaign material that would be used to advertise the elections to students. weekly meetings filled with discussions and several designs on Canva finally resulted in banners, flyers, stickers, and other such material that was used throughout the elections! something i learned from this aspect of the internship was how to better use Canva's tools, such as alignment, grouping, etc., and the benefit of collaboration when it comes to marketing. together with the rest of my commission, we were able to think of a color scheme, general aesthetic, and specific designs! 

the final step of this internship was boothing---the more sales part of the internship. for the week of the election, as part of the marketing commission, it was my job to help run booths where students were encouraged to come vote! vote! vote! this meant putting in hours of my day towards persuading students to come up to the booth, explaining how the elections work, and maintaining enthusiastic communication throughout the entire time! i learned a lot of social marketing techniques during this part of my internship, such as speaking confidently, yet kindly, maintaining eye contact, learning to persuade over asking, etc. 

surprisingly, this marketing internship ended up pushing me further in the direction of consumer-interaction than it did content creation! although i had come in with wanting to do the behind-the-scenes creation of visual materials that consumers would perceive, i ended up liking the more sales-aspect of my marketing internship: the actual interaction with customers. from here, i solidified my passion in business, but i decided that my next goal would be to testing the waters with sales!

an amazing opportunity to do exactly this came to me when i joined fresh prints as a campus manager. here's my story: