Saying Goodbye to Our Summer Interns

And just like that, school is back in session. Last Friday marked the final day for our remaining summer marketing interns, so we wanted to take a moment to say farewell, wish them good luck with their studies, and thank them for their hard work over the last few months.

Every year, the marketing department brings on a group of college interns for an immersive, hands-on summer experience. A point of pride for Abt—as well as each intern—is that this program isn’t filled with fetching coffee or glorified filing duties. While there is some of the rote labor typical of an entry-level job, the interns are trusted as full employees at Abt. They’re in the trenches, getting things done with the rest of the department, from crafting blog posts and using their newly-acquired SEO skills to improve Abt.com, to sitting in on monthly department meetings, where they’re encouraged to provide their thoughts on the topics at hand. One of the advantages of Abt being a smaller, family-run business is the flexibility it offers. Our interns are currently studying a variety disciplines—from PR to supply-chain management—and we were able to tailor each intern’s tasks to match their strengths.

Every summer internship culminates in a full-scale back-to-school marketing campaign aimed at college students, designed and carried out by the team of interns. This year’s campaign was the Abt2School Sweepstakes, a promotion that gave college students a chance to have Abt move them into their dorm or apartment. We would do all of the lifting, driving and moving, letting a student and their parents relax on what’s normally a very stressful day. Abt2School helped expand Abt’s reach to new audiences across the nation, and the lucky winner of the contest was moved into his dorm last Wednesday—check out a quick video of the move-in.

We got a chance to ask each intern their thoughts on what they experienced over the summer, and the common threads were the enjoyment of learning new things and surprise at how much they were allowed to do.

Abby, who attends UW-Madison to study Marketing (with specialization in supply chain management) told me that “Working at Abt has been a great experience to learn about the intricacies of a singles store’s day to day activities in multiple different departments and how they must work cohesively to attain their individual goals…I learned more about E-commerce and digital marketing than I ever learned in any of my marketing classes.”

Kylie, who is studying PR at DePaul said, in reference to planning the Abt2School sweepstakes: “I didn’t think I was ready to do all of that by myself.” 

Jeremy, who is studying Advertising with a minor in Business at DePauw, most enjoyed “learning about all of the different tactics being used in digital marketing today, and I was then able to put these skills to use while working on the creation and launch of the Abt2School promotional campaign.”

Jordan, a Digital Marketing major from UW-Madison, enjoyed “Learning about SEO optimization and the PR aspects of Abt.com. There was so much more to the website than I knew: coding each page, going around the store to find images… I think my favorite part was helping with our Pinterest account and finding alternative pictures and backgrounds for everything we uploaded.”

If you’re interested in an internship at Abt, keep an eye on our jobs site at jobs.abt.com, where they will be listed when available. And if you’re a student who needs an internship and you think Abt would be the best place for you, but you don’t see an internship listed, reach out to us with an email or Facebook message and we’ll see if we can create one for you anyway!