Summer Internship Spotlight - Kate Wren at Spotify

Greetings from the Big Apple!

Hey there! During the summer in between my first and second year of studying to get my MBA at the University of Colorado, I secured an MBA internship at Spotify in Global Marketing Strategy and Planning. I have been working and living in New York City and working on a variety of projects from the End of Year Holiday Campaign to coming up with strategy around Latin content. With my main project, I have been navigating a lot of ambiguity around the topic and have felt empowered by my managers and team to be the expert on the matter, taking the strategy in my own direction and supporting my hypotheses with data. I have also had a great opportunity to work cross functionally across many different teams in different markets. 

The internship has been a great experience! The human resources and marketing teams have planned lots of informational presentations, Q&As, and open forum chat opportunities with all the departments within marketing, as well as many C-Suite executives. I have learned a lot about marketing, business, and myself as well. There are about 40 other interns in the NYC office, but only five are MBAs. Everyone (interns and employees) is incredibly talented, with a lot of value to add from their different experiences and are always willing to meet and chat. 

I was a business undergrad major turned middle/high school math teacher for the past five years. So, while this is not my first business internship, I have had significantly greater amounts of education around business than actual experience working in an office. I value all of my classroom moments and they are probably much more transferable than I realize, but no matter where I worked this summer, by actually working in a business again, I was going to face a steep learning curve, regardless of what I have learned in the classroom. So, am I applying things I learned in my first year of MBA, yes. What exactly? That feels harder to answer because I’m still learning a lot. I know I’m using a lot of my skills from Professor Macaluso’s Supply Chain Management course, Professor Pete McGraw’s Marketing course and Professor Tony Tong’s Strategy course. 

Given that I am a “career-switcher” MBA, this internship was crucial for me in understanding what I want out of my MBA and where I want to go next. Some of the take aways I have learned are how to ask better questions, what I am good at, what I still need to work on, that I like operations and supply chain but I want to continue to learn more about marketing upon returning to classes in the fall.

Would I do it again? Yes!