My Internship Experience at Glimpse
During my first semester of fully remote school (Fall 2020), I was feeling quite unfulfilled at home taking Zoom classes. Gone were the days of studying with friends with rooms full of floor-to-ceiling whiteboards, going to events for free food, and meeting people organically. Therefore, for the Spring semester, I was really looking to work part-time alongside my online education.
Glimpse was, at its core, an online speed matching platform that easily allowed groups of people to meet lots of people and form one-on-one connections quickly. I had heard about Glimpse through using it for an event with the honors program at school. I absolutely loved the event and was so excited at the idea of being able to still meet so many people like that in an online semester. So, when I heard about the opportunity to join Glimpse as an intern, I immediately applied.
This opportunity could not have come at a more perfect time, especially because I was also looking to try out a product internship. Through speaking with the founders of Glimpse, I got really excited at the thought of dipping my toes in both the areas of startups and product growth.
Exciting work
The role
My role was “growth intern”, which was somewhat vague and open-ended on purpose. During my first few meetings with the founders and the team, I was asked about what I wanted to do here. Since I knew that I wanted to try out product management, that night, I just googled what product managers do on a day-to-day and wrote that down. The next day, I essentially pitched my ideas and explained that I wanted to be a PM, and listed out the things I wanted to try out.
By being able to define exactly what I wanted to get out of the internship, I was able to come up with a few different projects for myself throughout the duration of the internship. For example, I focused on doing user interviews, identifying user personas, and data analysis. With the information I gathered from doing the research, I was constantly giving pitches on new features and presentations on the data and our users. Being a product growth intern with a bit of a technical background, I was also able to help scope out and implement a fun feature within Glimpse which matched users by music taste.
Venturing out
Working at such a small company, I also had the opportunity to take on several different projects during my time at Glimpse. For example, I learned how to sell Glimpse as a product and conduct sales calls. By the end of my internship, I was even able to demo and sell Glimpse premium to some users and even the Dropbox internship program. Through selling Glimpse, I was inspired to do some market analysis of Glimpse’s competitors. So that’s exactly what I did — look at how much other platforms are charging and pinpoint what exactly they’re charging their users for.
A good time
Working at Glimpse was a good time. Since the founders of Glimpse were only a few years older than me and had dropped out of Duke to pursue Glimpse, they were very relatable and inspiring at the same time. The rest of the team consisted of mostly college-aged or recently graduated members. It’s hard to explain, but the camaraderie was very present and enjoyable.
Throughout my time there, I also got to choose Glimpse swag in the form of sweatshirts, order free Doordash, and engage in several team bonding activities such as playing Among Us.
Conclusion
Glimpse and everyone involved have helped me grown so much as a professional and person. From conducting user interviews to implementing my ideas in code that same week, I learned so much about what it’s like to be a product manager at an early-stage start-up. From conversations with my co-workers and learning about the start-up world, I finally have a clearer sense of what I want to do in my career. Most importantly, I met so many amazing people that I want to stay in contact with forever. Interning at Glimpse part-time during my spring semester was a great decision that gave me the piece I was missing from remote school, even though the internship was also remote. By the end of the internship, I feel like I really was able to get everything out of it that I wanted to.
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed reading about my Glimpse internship, check out how I got my NASA internship.
