Frankie Li, COL ’24, Philadelphia, PA
This summer I had an amazing experience working at Paramount as a Walmart Toy Retail Development Intern! With the release of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theatrical, Mutant Mayhem, I had an exciting opportunity to work on one of my own childhood favorite franchises. On top of that, I had an amazing team of fellow interns and great leadership to work with throughout my internship.
High-level, I worked on retail products for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, focusing on improving their online sales performance and summarizing trends across all of Paramount’s retail partners. Day to day, I interviewed various partners across the team (from co-interns to executive leaders), wrangled and cleaned data, conducted internal and external product research, and executed creative ideas generated with co-interns. Through these experiences, I was able to develop my skills in teamwork, data analysis, and research.
Moreover, this experience confirmed a suspicion I had: the entertainment industry is ample with exciting work. The passion that my team and co-interns had in their work was unparalleled. The way that people showed up, proactively assisted each other, and acted as a team demonstrated to me that I was at the right place. Furthermore, everyone worked on brands that we saw everywhere, creating products, services, and content that was extremely tangible. Lastly, the emotions that many of these franchises drew out, including Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, were under mutually across the team and pushed us to put the best work we had in our projects.
In one of the most fulfilling and exciting summers I have had, I am grateful for Career Services for providing me with this opportunity to pursue this Paramount internship in New York. This experience will be foundational to my career in the future as I hope to continue working in the entertainment industry or doing similar work.
This is part of a series of posts by recipients of the 2023 Career Services Summer Funding Grant. We’ve asked funding recipients to reflect on their summer experiences and talk about the industries in which they spent their summer. You can read the entire series here
