What It’s Like Being an Intern at Moves
Giving Back to the Community
At Moves, we don’t just care about giving back to gig workers — we also want to give back to our local community. Hiring post-secondary students as interns is a great way to do this. They benefit by gaining real-world experience and earning some money, while we gain with the influx of energy and fresh ideas they bring. As the summer semester comes to a close, we wanted our 3 interns to write about their experiences working at Moves. Here’s what they had to say:
Baadshah Verma, Product Intern — 5th year at Queen’s University for Bachelor of Commerce and Computer Science:
During my internship at Moves, I had the opportunity to work on the Product team. One of my favorite aspects of working at Moves was that I was always treated like a full-time employee. From the start, I was able to select what projects I worked on and how I wanted to approach them. I wasn’t used to this — in past internships, I wasn’t given the opportunity to completely lead a project and push it in the direction I thought would make the most sense. This experience taught me how to execute from experience and mistakes, rather than taking the easy route and simply asking my manager for the clear-cut path to a solution.
A highlight event for me was the Q&A sessions we had with our founder and CEO, Matt. Throughout the internship, we had hour-long sessions where interns got to ask questions and listen to his experiences. These Q&As were great, with no question being off-limits. Learning about how the company originated, the future strategy, and the outlook of the organization, were just a couple of topics we discussed.
One of the key projects I worked on was the business weekly report. To give a bit of context — we send our members a weekly email with detailed insights that aim to help track their performance, interact with the community, and teach how to improve their gig business. Over the course of the term, I had the opportunity to take lead on this initiative. This consisted of creating new insights, redesigning the email with Figma, launching multiple iterations, and creating an Amplitude dashboard to track the performance of the email. Each iteration was one week long, which allowed me to see the full product cycle — from ideation all the way to delivery. This is something I mentioned in my interview process, that I wanted to go through each step of the cycle to see how this works in practice. It was the most memorable project I worked on throughout the term and I’m glad I had the chance to work with the team.
I’m very appreciative of the Moves team and everyone I worked with over my term — it’s been an amazing past few months. Moves has some incredibly exciting ideas in shop and I’m looking forward to seeing them launched in the next few months.
Erika Shea, Customer Success Intern — 3rd year at University of Waterloo for BA in Peace and Conflict Studies:
Heading into my third co-op term, I was nervous and excited for what awaited me at Moves, especially coming from a non-technical background and having little to no exposure to financial services. As a student, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed or left on the sidelines for the first few weeks of a remote co-op placement. But my nerves quickly disappeared within the first week due to Moves’ dedication to ensuring a seamless onboarding experience. Moves made sure the first couple weeks of my placement were meaningful by arranging meet-and-greets with several team members and carefully laying out my daily tasks. Then when it finally came time to jump in and grind, I was prepared.
As a Customer Success Intern, my day-to-day schedule involved maintaining relationships with our members, troubleshooting product issues and escalating them to the Engineering team, and managing members’ Cash Advances. I learned a lot about best practices within Financial Services and was able to directly track how Moves products impact members. Being the first point of contact for our members allowed me to find gaps in our products and voice these concerns to the rest of the team. I loved that there was always important work to be done and that each day presented me with a new challenge.
To give employees a break from the chaos of startup life, Moves held tons of fun and educational events to build community and offer learning opportunities. My personal favourite was a Lunch and Learn about pathways to reconciliation for Canada and Indigenous communities. The event was hosted by an Indigenous speaker who was kind enough to share her experiences as an Indigenous person in Canada and discuss how non-Indigenous peoples can contribute to making Canada a safer community for Indigenous groups and other minorities. As an Indigenous ally, I was thrilled that Moves saw value in hosting this cultural awareness event.
As I wrap up my co-op term at Moves, I feel quite lucky that I had the opportunity to contribute to such a progressive organization that is genuinely aiming to make the world a better place. As I move on to other opportunities, I look forward to seeing Moves’ growth over the years to come.
Vivian Sun, Growth Intern — 4th year at Ivey Business School for Honours Business Administration:
Coming in, I didn’t quite know what to expect — I was super excited having accepted my offer, but I’d never worked in a Growth position before. My worries easily went away with the next email from Sarah, our Employee Experience Manager. A colorful welcome package with warm hellos from the team, along with a schedule of our first week planned down to the hour, gave my onboarding experience a seamless start. Throughout the week, my one-on-one meetings with the members of the Growth team, the leads of neighboring teams, and Matt, the CEO, allowed me to familiarize myself quickly with the people at Moves and the friendly culture it offered.
With my internship off to a strong start, I was ecstatic to learn more about the company’s processes, get started on new projects, and begin contributing to the growth of Moves! Throughout the summer, I worked on several Content Strategy-related sprints, including writing up blog posts for SEO, sending out monthly newsletters to keep members informed, and building onboarding email sequences to guide our customer retention funnel. These were prime opportunities that gave me valuable hands-on experience with programs like Braze, Hubspot, Segment, SEMRush, and WordPress. Another sprint that stood out to me was app store optimization, where I conducted A/B testing on Moves’ app store listing, authored bi-weekly release notes, and monitored our reviews and ratings. The whole summer, I worked closely with Alwin, my manager, Sally, our Growth Marketer, Mu, our Brand Designer, and Sam, our VP — shout out to the team for creating such an efficient and synergetic environment!
One of the most notable things about Moves to me was its strong culture, values, and proactive lens on inclusivity in the workplace. I joined the DEBI (Diversity, Equity, Belonging, Inclusivity) committee early on in my internship because it is something I am passionate about, and the team did not disappoint. Together, we planned cultural company-wide events — most memorable for me was the ASL learning session with Deafinitely Dope! We also developed diversity outreach initiatives, including a BIPOC-focused campaign, and built on internal DEBI campaigns, omitting non-inclusive terms like “guys,” and educating on lesser-known cultural slurs to raise awareness and avoid future use.
There’s no doubt that my experience at Moves this summer exceeded my expectations, and it’s been amazing to have been part of the journey with the Moves team.
Huge thanks to our interns!
On behalf of everyone else at Moves, we’d like to thank our interns for their contributions. We wish them all the best in their future studies and endeavors!
