Marketing, Collaborating, App Building, and Thruhiking the Tahoe Rim Trail
Tahoe Rim Trail, CA - Photo Credit: Taylor Kim
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Finding an internship the summer of one’s junior year of college can be stressful - and the added factors of Covid-19 and remote work certainly do not make the process any easier. It would have been easy to just pass on having any sort of internship experience at all; after all, how much can you get out of an online-only experience anyways? As my summer with Pathloom has proven, you can walk away with a lot more than you’d think.
After hours of scrolling through job search sites and filtering endlessly for the right opportunity, I came across a posting for a startup located just an hour away from where I go to school. The mountain-tree logo, and a quick scan of the internship description had me hooked. I simply couldn’t pass up an opportunity to work with a local company that focused on exactly what my personal mission is - making the outdoors more accessible and easier to reach for everyone!
It was exciting to meet with Ankit, Pathloom’s Founder and CEO, to discuss the position - and I even found out he had done the trail around Lake Tahoe I was hoping to do over the summer. It’s rare to find an organization that ties in both my academic pursuits in business and my personal outdoor hobbies, and I am grateful to have gotten to work with professionals who share both of those passions! On top of that, I loved getting to know our marketing intern team from around the country, and especially loved to hear about their favorite outdoor adventures in places and states I hadn’t known much about before.
My role as a Consumer and Engagement Marketing Intern dealt with a specific aspect of marketing that I had never really considered, but my manager and our Head of Marketing had noticed my involvement on Tiktok and quickly pulled me into projects surrounding that. I got the chance to explore content creation across Pathloom’s various social media platforms, and research influencer involvement in startups like ours. Being a part of a startup is a unique and incredibly valuable experience that I hadn’t necessarily considered before - with most of my Silicon Valley business school friends interning at large, established corporations - it was simply a more unusual path. But as we compared our experiences throughout the summer, I realized how much more interesting I thought my projects were and how much I was learning that would be applicable to any future projects I may work on.
Though the experience could sometimes be daunting, being a part of integral marketing plans and creating content that directly targeted our public audience was exciting. Working with the rest of the marketing interns was fun as well, as we are located all over the country and got to share our individual outdoors experiences through content and conversation. We also all had different strengths within the marketing field, so it was exciting to see how the other interns created content in various media and for Pathloom’s different social media channels. Working directly with the Head of Marketing was also a fantastic experience that might not be possible to have in an internship at a bigger company, but was easily possible with a startup like Pathloom. Having such a direct relationship with the whole marketing team made things flow very smoothly and also allowed for me to work closely with and learn from very talented people.
One of the most unique things about this experience was how I was not only allowed, but encouraged to take two weeks off of the internship to hike the Tahoe Rim Trail. I am grateful to have spent the summer with people who understand the value of such trips and helped me tie my internship in by having me create content using my own video and photo footage! I even got to write my first blog post about my experiences preparing for the trip and then my second about the unexpected things that occurred on my trip. Using my own outdoor adventures as a lens for content creation and my own marketing learning experience was exciting, and I am grateful that our Head of Marketing and our intern team were willing to let me take the time off and come back refreshed with new ideas for Pathloom.
Remote internships have the potential to be just busy work to pad a resume, but I am happy to say that I got so much more out of my time with Pathloom. The startup environment is something I had not had much experience with before, but I feel like I got deep hands-on knowledge about it throughout the summer - and it was even more valuable to have the startup deal with my personal hobbies. Getting to work directly on an app that I plan to use for my own recreational needs in the future was a fantastic opportunity, and certainly helped me learn more about both the business end of outdoor recreation and the in-the-field end of trip planning. Thank you to Brett, Ankit, Bryan, and our Pathloom marketing team for a fulfilling and fun summer!
Pathloomers work from everywhere! (Your setup may vary) - Photo Credit: Scott Carnahan
Thanks so much to Taylor for her incredible contributions to Pathloom over the course of her summer internship! We’ll miss her terribly as she concludes her time with us and resumes her studies at Santa Clara University. Her Tahoe Rim Trail experience was an inspiration to us all here at Pathloom, as were her marketing skills, social media wizardry, and team-first attitude. Best of luck with your Senior year, Taylor!
Are you a current student interested in interning with us here at Pathloom? We have a ton of opportunities available across a wide array of fields - marketing, engineering, writing, UI/UX, analytics, PR, and so much more! We post all of our internship opportunities on the Handshake platform - find us there, email us at info@pathloom.com, and/or reach out to the Career Services department of your college or university to connect with us!
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Pathloom is a Bay Area-based technology startup on a mission to get more people outdoors, more often by reimagining the outdoor trip planning app.
