Meet the Summer Growth Team: Quin Koether

The tallest member of the Campuswire Growth Team (Go Lions)!

“If I were an animal, I think I would be a fox. Foxes are cool, they’re a little bit nimble and a little bit smart, they’re doing their thing and hanging out.”

Quin is nineteen years old and hails from Fairfield, CT, a short, one-hour train ride from our headquarters here in Lower Manhattan. He joins us from Columbia University, where he’s a rising junior studying Computer Science. We sat down with Quin for a quick chat…

What do you think about Downtown NYC compared to Uptown, since you’re used to spending more time around Columbia and Morningside Heights?

“First of all, I love the city! But there’s a lot more happening downtown, especially in terms of nightlife and things that wouldn’t normally be happening on campus. But this is definitely my favorite city in the world.”

What are your other interests outside of school and work?

“I’m on the rowing team at Columbia, so that usually takes up most of my time with four or five hours of practice per day. So that’s kind of my main thing.”

“Do you have to wake up really early for that?”

“Yep, it’s usually a 6:15 bus, so I have to up at 5:45 and ready to go.”

What was your favorite subject in middle school?

“It was definitely PE, followed closely by Math.”

What’s your pet peeve?

“I have two big pet peeves. My first is slow walkers. I’m pretty tall and I have long legs so I like to walk fast. And my second pet peeve is people who like to merge on to the highway at dangerously slow speeds. That’s the worst, when you’re trying to get on the highway and someone merges at 30 mph and then you’re fighting for your life trying not to get run over.”

If you were an ice cream flavor, what would you be?

“I would be The Tonight Dough, the Ben and Jerry’s flavor. Because there’s just a lot going on, a lot of good flavors.”

How many cups of coffee do you drink per day?

“I drink 0 cups of coffee per day — I usually don’t consume any caffeine, ever.”

So how do you function?

“I do not… No, I guess I just get enough sleep and try to power through the rest.”

What’s your favorite place in the world?

“My favorite place in the world is probably the Cayman Islands. I used to go there all the time when I was a little kid.”

What’s the longest you’ve gone without sleep and why?

“Probably 35 hours. I was flying to Shanghai and I can’t make myself fall asleep on planes and by the time I got there it was day again. So I kind of had to power through the whole next day because I couldn’t nap right away and mess up my sleep schedule.”

Do you collect anything?

“Not really… Shoes, maybe. I have a lot of shoes.”

What’s the most embarrassing thing that’s ever happened to you?

“In high school, I was 15 minutes late for my Chemistry class and my Chemistry teacher had me stand in front of the class for the rest of the period. I had to do all of my work standing up in front of the class. It was pretty funny looking back at it now, but at the time, I was not loving that experience.”

If you could only watch one movie for the rest of your life, what would it be?

“I’d have to say Good Will Hunting. It’s a classic and I could always watch that movie and enjoy myself.”

What was your first job?

“My first job was when I was like 8 or 9 and I would go to my Dad’s office and shred documents for him every day. It was super fun at the time because I got to shred documents which I thought was pretty sick.”

What have you been doing day-to-day at Campuswire?

“It’s been a lot of content pitches, creating content to share with professors, building new marketing strategies, and a lot of really diverse stuff.”

So you started a couple of days later than most of your interns — were you nervous about that?

“I think I was, just because I wasn’t sure how far in everyone else wold be. Also, on the first day, I was just trying to play catch up as quickly as I could and get on track with everything as quickly as possible and I was worried that it would take me a while to get on the same page with the rest of the team. But luckily, I was able to jump right in and get going.”

What has been your favorite part of the job so far?

“I think the most rewarding thing for me so far has been to see the direct effects of the work we’re doing. It’s clear that we’re doing meaningful work that will impact the company and not just doing busy work that a lot of interns at other companies might be doing.”

What has been challenging for you so far?

“For me, one of the biggest challenges has been some of the videos and podcasts that we’ve done, pretty much anything with a camera or microphone. I’m not much of an actor, so it’s kind of tough — I don’t really know what I’m doing on camera. And it’s been pretty demanding in terms of producing ideas, so it’s challenging to consistently come up with good stuff.”

Can you think of a time in college when Campuswire would have been really helpful?

“Yeah, definitely. Personally, I don’t love jumping in in my discussion sections, partly because we have some mandatory philosophy classes and there can be a lot of philosophy majors who dominate the discussion. So I didn’t always get to jump in much because they would always have something probably a little bit better to say than whatever I thought I had. So I would have really like a forum with an anonymous posting feature like Campuswire’s so that I could have said what I had to say and my professor would have seen my participation as opposed to her maybe not knowing if I was actually paying attention even though I just didn’t want to say anything that was worse than what had already been said.”

What is something that surprised you about the job or the company?

“I think what’s surprised me the most is the variety of stuff that we’re doing. I kind of had an idea that we were going to be doing a bunch of different things, but we’re creating so much content and working on so much strategy, which I’m definitely enjoying, but it’s definitely more different types of things that I expected to be doing.”

What are you most looking forward to for the rest of the summer?

“I’m most excited to hopefully do some meaningful work, help the company grow, and hopefully we can keep taking it in a good direction because I think it’s a tool that can be really helpful to a lot of people on a lot of college campuses.”

Thanks, Quin! Much more to come from our Summer Growth Team…