Please briefly describe your background prior to Haas
I started my career as an Army Signal Officer, a job in which I was responsible for technology related to communication and many personnel. My first assignment was a yearlong Afghanistan deployment and I was subsequently stationed in Anchorage, Alaska. I spent a total of 4.5 years in the Army and pivoted to the private sector as a Cybersecurity Consultant for a boutique consulting firm.
What industries and functions did you recruit for and why?
The industry that I focused on was the tech industry because I believe that the industry is one that’s most capable of implementing positive change at scale. I recruited for both Product Manager and Strategy & Ops roles because both roles seemed similar to the different hats that I wore and enjoyed while I was in the Army.
Briefly describe how you approached recruiting. Anything worked particularly well for you?
My initial approach was to network with Haas or USC alums, or vets in the roles and industries that I was passionate about. Unfortunately, mobility tech was not in a good spot financially and they were not opening any internship slots. I decided to become industry agnostic within tech and applied to any open PM or Strat & Ops internship roles that I saw online. I spent the first two or three weeks of school iterating on my resume and started applying to roles - I do believe that applying early helped me land many interviews. I interviewed for both PM and StratOps positions but the eBay StratOps role was the first to give me an offer in December. What helped me for that interview was to put myself in the shoes as an eBay seller and buyer and strategize on how I would improve on the pain points that I faced.
Briefly introduce your internship company and your team
I worked on the Global Seller business unit as a StratOps MBA intern and was given a project quite wider in scope than I had expected. I worked with cross functional members such as PMs, risk analysts, data analysts, to comb through data to pinpoint the problem and iterate on the solutions.
Thoughts / reflections on your internship
I went into the internship testing my hypothesis that I would enjoy StratOps much more than PM and that hypothesis was strongly confirmed. My teammates were all super nice and they went out of their way to help me out and constantly checked in on me to see if I needed any help or feedback. This summer was an absolute blast because of my fellow MBA intern friend group. There were about 9 of us in the San Jose office and we all stayed at the same hotel that eBay housed us in. We pretty much hung out daily and went on many day trips to nearby locations such as Half Moon Bay, Santa Cruz, Carmel, SF, Berkeley, Sausalito, California Great America, etc. The intern programming was also phenomenal and eBay truly spoiled us with swag - I think I received over 20 pieces of eBay swag, and day trips to nearby attractions.