Hello everyone! My name is Jason Edmonds, and I’m a senior who worked at MAXSA Innovations LLC this past summer. MAXSA Innovations only had five people in their company (including myself), so my internship experience was definitely an adventure and a truly unique experience that I’m extremely grateful for and excited to share with you all!
My day-to-day is somewhat hard to describe because I worked on so many different projects throughout the course of my internship and dabbled in so many aspects of MAXSA’s business. Early on in my internship, my primary focus was advertising. I worked hard to create a social media presence for MAXSA through the use of Facebook ads, Amazon marketing tools, Google Analytics, website promotions, and more. However, as my internship went on, it transitioned, and the latter part of my internship was heavily involved in product design, market research, and anything related to sales (calling and emailing existing clients as well as finding potential new customers).
A lot of times, these projects forced me to do a lot of problem-solving as well as creative thinking. At times, it felt as if I were a mini-entrepreneur within the structure of MAXSA: I spent a lot of time troubleshooting issues with various advertising platforms, thinking of ways to increase website sales and traffic, and coming up with new products that might address a niche in the current market. Skip, my manager, played a big role in this type of free-flowing, creative working environment. Most of my tasks were very open-ended, and his motto was to “just make things happen.” This forced me to diagnose the issue, design a process to fix the issue, and present it in a way that I thought best represented the work I did, while also providing the next steps that we should take in a given process. The agency that Skip allowed me to have in the projects I pursued felt good, as it showed that Skip had enough confidence in me to produce work that would make a legitimate impact on MAXSA’s business. Some of my projects were successful, while others failed, but Skip always emphasized that he didn’t care so much about the result as long as we at least attempted to solve the problem.
Throughout the internship, I had to balance a lot of these projects with operations responsibilities, such as helping move products at our warehouse or packaging products for dropshipping. Every day had a different sort of workflow, and this was really exciting for me. However, the work environment at MAXSA always remained the same: fast-paced and innovative. This type of day-to-day was engaging for me; my tasks never remained the same for too long, yet I was always pushed to build upon my ideas and come up with something that would become a long-lasting fixture at MAXSA.
I’d like to give a big shout out to Skip and the rest of my employees at MAXSA! They gave me so much autonomy throughout my internship and didn’t treat me like a typical “intern” at all. I was immediately welcomed as a member of their team and was expected to contribute right away. I’m also grateful for the CCPA and the Whitehead Internship Program for making this all possible. Anyone who likes a rather unstructured yet fast-paced and entrepreneurial internship should definitely strongly consider this internship.
