Hi! My name is Emily Nguyen, and I am a rising senior double majoring in Business Administration, Marketing and Strategic and Corporate Communication with a minor in Integrated Educational Studies. This past summer, I had the opportunity to serve as an investor relations intern for Gateway Group in Newport Beach!

I was a bit late to job searching for summer internships, and I started to get discouraged at the end of April, but I

found this position on Indeed, and everything from the pre-interview to the hiring process ran so smoothly. It is not easy to find an internship when it feels like EVERYONE is searching, but if you stay consistent, it will pay off!

As an investor relations intern, my tasks mainly consist of administrative assistant work, which included daily correspondence with clients who call, redirecting calls, organization of the office, ensuring stock of all office supplies, and smaller projects that people around the office assign to me if they need additional help with their tasks. Funny enough, the class that has helped me the most with this internship has been MGSC 220, which is a lower-division business class that taught us how to use Microsoft Excel. The formulas I learned in that class have aided me in completing projects quicker and more efficiently and allowed me to organize further/clarify past documents that everyone in the company refers to.

Gateway Office

Since Gateway Group is a smaller company, everyone who works here knows each other well. We all work alongside the CEO directly, and everyone always engages in small talk with each other. COM 410 has also helped me be more accomplished in this role because it taught me how to examine and analyze company culture. Working with a smaller company, everyone reports directly to one person, and these managers usually have only one person under them. This structure allows for more helpful two-way conversations and better management because everyone gets to know their “staff” on a deeper level, compared to others managing a large team and never actually getting to know them.

While the tasks at my internship aren’t tricky, having a refresher on Excel has been nice. Additionally, by acting as a front desk liaison, I’ve learned to be more confident in my voice, especially over the phone. While it may seem like a little thing, the constant need for professionalism in the office has slowly prepared me to move into the working world post-grad.

A colleague and me

The most valuable thing I’ve learned from this internship is how to network. People are willing to help and get to know you, but you need to make the first step and keep open communication lines with these people. I loved hearing about my coworkers’ personal career journeys because everyone was so different, and everyone was so open to giving me advice for my path. I’ve loved getting to know everyone at the company and will be staying in touch. While it was nice to experience a professional working atmosphere for the first time, talking to my coworkers about not-so-serious things like Love Island and the peach milkshake from Chick-Fil-A was also lovely. The biggest piece of advice I have from this experience is to get to know those around you daily – it’ll make the workday go by so much quicker for one and also give you a new network to reach out to if you ever need anything.