To Bloom It May Concern:

My name is Kurt Martin and I’m a Senior Advertising student concentrating in Brand Strategy and Research. I will be graduating at the end of this semester and will be completing my internship around the same time. I was ecstatic for the opportunity to work in the Marketing department at Bloomin’ Brands as a Consumer Insights Intern and can honestly say it has been a wonderful experience. I never thought I could learn so much in just three months, but I did.

I began the internship in September. I was nervous, excited, and didn’t know what to expect as this was my first time working in a professional environment. When it was time to meet the team I would be working with, I joined the meeting and found out my camera didn’t work.

Not a good start.

This goes to show how different a remote internship can be. Luckily, I got it to work shortly after and this made things less weird. Everyone at the company was super nice and immediately made me feel welcomed. I’ve heard some stories of horrible internship experiences, so I was happy to work alongside great people who helped me out along the way and made the experience an enjoyable one.

For the internship, I was given a project to work on that required bringing customer feedback data from multiple sources into one Excel workbook that could track performance. Bloomin’ Brands is made up of multiple restaurant chains, and because I had experience working in a restaurant, I knew how important customer satisfaction is for the business. I was eager to create something I could be proud of and something that would be useful. I had some experience working with Excel and analytics platforms, but I had to learn a lot along the way. That is one thing I would tell someone starting their first internship: you won’t know everything at first, but you’ll pick up new skills throughout the entire process. This is a good thing though; everything I learned will certainly be useful in the future and having to try new things taught me that the learning doesn’t stop after school. I loved seeing what platforms the company uses and what they’re able to do with the information gathered. I also met with people working in other roles and departments and learned a lot from them as well. I was lucky enough that my managers arranged these meetings, but I would encourage interns to meet with people working in different positions as it can only help.

My internship experience was better than I ever could have thought, thanks to everyone I worked with and the mentorship they provided. I learned a lot from them and the assignments they gave me. I feel that this opportunity was a perfect start to a career in Marketing and I would love to work in Consumer Insights or a similar field in the future.