July 16th, 2018

I’ve now finished six weeks of my internship. And I’ve accomplished quite a lot. Presenting in front of division management, attending vendor meetings, and learning more and more about data each day has helped me grow as a young professional.
So why am I not absolutely in love with this role? Am I just afraid of the future and in denial of graduating, or is it the job?
There’s only one way to find out: see what else is out there. Kohl’s was very adamant from the first day that an internship is a learning experience, and that we should take the initiative to be curious about the world around us. So that’s what I did. I asked my coach if she knew anyone in the marketing department I could talk to, reached out to schedule a meeting and talked to the associate about her role in marketing at Kohl’s.
Although I really liked hearing more about marketing, I’m still very confused as to what I want. There are so many possibilities for marketing, so how do I choose just one? After our meeting, I scheduled more coffee chats with different marketing roles, and I just hope that talking to more people will help me figure it out.
We also heard from our second executive speaker, and each speech is starting to make me feel better about graduating. A common theme I see with all their career paths is that nothing is definite. They’ve all had so many other jobs and zigzagged between roles; nothing was a straight path. Even if I don’t know what I want right this second, the most important part is that I start.
President Sonya admitted that “not every day is going to be great.” In college, in our careers and in our personal lives, this will always be true. Not every day of my internship has been perfect, and I’ve definitely had to roll with the punches a few times.
For example, this week we had a practice presentation for our second project. I was having some trouble pulling the data and knowing exactly what metrics to speak about, but I really wanted to figure it out on my own.
Well, that backfired on me. I kept telling myself I would have it done, and the next thing I know it’s 30 minutes before our practice presentations start, and I have nothing. I went to my assistant buyer and told her that everyone was telling me to do something different and that I had nothing ready to present.
She made it look so easy, and I really have no idea how. I watched her pull up two Excel documents, click some filters to sort the data, and point the screen.
“Done! Now let’s go pull the samples, and you can take a few minutes to decide what you want to say.”
I just followed her to the boxes of socks and pretended like I knew what was going on. When I sat back down at my desk, I just started writing numbers on sticky notes. Whatever I was going to say, I’d decide when I started talking!
As we left the meeting, my AB came up to me: “I am SO impressed with you. You had no idea what you were presenting on until a few minutes before, and you analyzed the data and spoke clearly like you had been practicing for weeks. That’s definitely something you need to be able to do in this job, so awesome work!”
I guess the best way to learn is to jump right in! Who knew I’d be able to do that? I still need to refine my presentation for next week, but I feel so much better. Here’s to finally doing something right!


