US Student tells her story of being an intern at HerBusiness
by Laura Heineman
G’day! My name is Laura Heineman. In the coming fall semester, I will continue with my fourth year in Marketing and Communication Studies at the University of Iowa. Currently, I am writing this blog from my home in Ogden, Iowa, USA, approximately 8,900 miles (or 14,323 km) from the wonderful city of Sydney where I lived and worked for the majority of my summer (your winter) to earn study abroad credit hours and gain internship experience through Arcadia University. Arcadia set me up with the wonderful opportunity to work for HerBusiness.
Headed by the motivating entrepreneur Suzi Dafnis, Herbusiness has over 20,000 community members and is working each day to provide valuable information for working women (and even a few men!). Through their website, blog, podcasts, webinars, interviews, mentors and articles, HerBusiness aims to connect, educate and empower their members and to help them achieve their dreams in the world of business. I was one of the people working behind the scenes, helping make everything run effectively and smoothly. A lot of effort goes into continuously updating the website and making it more relatable and interesting to HerBusiness members.
As an intern, I was given a wide variety of tasks that I could apply my skills from university to real-life marketing situations. I performed customer relationship management by completing data entry and organising the customer/member database. I worked with social media and provided continuous and interesting tweets during online webinar sessions ranging from 30 to 1,000 participants. I also updated and posted new blog posts and executed search engine optimisation (SEO) to increase traffic to the HerBusiness website and the herBusiness blog, making sure the online information remained fresh and interesting.
Working with the blogs was my favourite part of my internship because I got to read articles and watch video interviews by experienced, successful businesswomen and pick up tips on a variety of business topics. Being an HerBusiness intern immersed me in a culture of women empowerment and has given me immeasurable insight into the world of business. I have soaked up mass amounts of business information just by being able to listen to these strong female leaders. HerBusiness sets a high standard for women and businesses and I’m glad I received the opportunity to work there.
HerBusiness provides internships for business students from all over the world. Tasks vary depending on your area of interest and study. What we can guarantee is that you’ll be included in the development and delivery of great business information, you’ll learn new skills and you’ll be an important part of our family. If you’d like to be considered for an internship, call us on 1300 720 120 or email us here.
