Hi everyone! My name is Shannon Coakley, and I am a rising third-year student at Chapman. I am majoring in Business Administration with an emphasis in Marketing and a minor in Economics. After a long and tough process of applying for internships, working with my network, and going through interviews, I landed the Portfolio Marketing Intern position at Vocera. Vocera offers the leading platform for clinical communication and workflow optimization. Its mission is to simplify and improve the lives of healthcare professionals and patients while enabling hospitals to enhance the quality of care and operational efficiency. I am excited to be a part of their Portfolio Marketing team for the summer because it will allow me to apply what I have learned in my classes and learn new skills that only a job could teach me.

While going about finding this internship, my main sources were LinkedIn, Handshake, and Career Services. I regularly met with a career counselor to help me with my job search and perfect my resume and cover letter. Then I would take the tools I got from those meetings and apply for jobs. It was a very long process, and I didn’t hear back from most companies. After lots of rejection and interviews, I was offered an internship with Vocera. I learned from this experience that getting rejected doesn’t just mean that you were not qualified, but the recruiter may have looked at your resume and saw your interests were different from what they could offer you at their company. Not only do you need to be a good fit for their company, but the company needs to fit what you are looking for as well. It is important to keep your head up throughout the process because every interview is more practice, and rejection doesn’t reflect you as a person.