For incoming student considering careers in tech, Wharton's Career Management has strong relationships with many of the biggest and innovative companies in the tech industry today. Here's a look at two Wharton students who are spending their summer in the emerging fields of digital media and space tech:
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Neil Tyler (WG'14)
1. Tell us about how you came to this role.
I was specifically focused on media & entertainment opportunities for my summer internship and had applied to Comcast due to its ties to NBCU and close relationship with Wharton and the M&E Club. I applied through Careerpath and likely got the interview because my background most closely matched statistical work and looking for patterns in data (former poker player).
2. What kind of projects are you working on?
I am primarily working on market segmentation and clustering - looking at a variety of competitive and demographic data that have been aggregated by region and DMA (essentially major cities). Using statistical software, I am analyzing which regions and DMAs have similar characteristics and clustering them into distinct groups that can then inform marketing decisions. I am then making preliminary marketing message/strategy suggestions that can help Comcast increase its market share across its different product lines.
3. What is the most interesting thing you've learned so far?
Learning about the general M&E and cable industries from the perspective of the market leader has been the most interesting. I have my own views on the direction the industry is moving and what consumers want, but it is very interesting to hear about the different initiatives throughout Comcast and what excites/scares the senior leaders of Comcast. A common theme throughout all marketing departments is the rebranding of Comcast through the Xfinity brand, which has really begun to pay dividends in transforming Comcast from a hated cable company to a more respected media & entertainment and technology innovation company.
4. Any advice to future students?
Just be patient with recruiting. If you have a passion for media & entertainment and/or technology, the recruiting season for these industries is a little later than everything else but it is best to follow your passion to figure out if you want to work in these industries full-time or not. It is a tough balance to strike with the recruiting timing, but don't panic and just take the first consulting or banking job offered to you. If you feel that you have the background that will appeal to an M&E or technology company, start reaching out to potential targets early so that you can have options come March when your first offer may be expiring. Many tech and M&E jobs don't get posted until after DIP week, but both the tech and M&E clubs have great career counselors and 2nd-years that can help guide you and keep you from taking a job in another industry that might not be best for you for your summer internship.
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Katie Littlefield (WG'14)
1. What are you working on?
This summer I am a business development intern in the SpaceX government sales team, which is based in Washington, DC alongside the Legal and Government Affairs teams. About 95% of the company is based in the Los Angeles area, so everyone operates on California time.
My big project for the summer is refining the sales and marketing strategy for one of SpaceX's new business lines - private cargo transport, which until now has only been available via NASA, and only to and from the International Space Station. SpaceX offers a reusable capsule that can orbit the earth for 30 days without needing to stop at ISS, and is still in the process of being approved for human spaceflight. I wake up in the morning thinking, "Aside from science experiments, what can we fit in that capsule and how much would people pay?"
My smaller side projects have been fascinating diversions into some strange corners of the industry - I've developed speaking points for founder/CEO/Chief Designer Elon Musk's upcoming industry trends forecasting presentation to a government customer, attended a NASA press conference on asteroid threat identification and mitigation, and represented SpaceX at an industry panel with the British Embassy on American and international regulatory landscapes.
2. How did you come upon the role and why did it interest you?
Enterprise search! Prior to Wharton, I worked in sales and marketing at a satellite imagery and analytics company, DigitalGlobe (NYSE:DGI). Through that network, I knew someone who knew someone at NASA who had helped structure the SpaceX deal for delivering cargo to the International Space Station. In March, that contact introduced me to the SpaceX VP of Government Sales, and things moved surprisingly fast from there.
I see space travel as one of the few truly "new" industries that our generation gets to be a part of shaping, and expect Aerospace to be a significant contributor to Wharton recruiting statistics by 2025. Right now, it's sort of where the computing industry was in the 1960s: mainframes led to PCs, then laptops, going from a small science project to ubiquity within a few decades, and the innovation continues. This summer offers me an intriguing glimpse of the early years of industry formation, from the perspective of the industry leader. I'm learning a lot!
I should also mention that I have one co-intern, an MBA-JD candidate at Stanford who previously worked on Google's policy team and is a self-professed space nerd. He also found this job through enterprise search. SpaceX has a massive summer internship program for engineering students, but has no official program for MBAs.
3. Any advice to future students who are interested in the area? (Best background, most useful skills, etc.)
As with any tech job, having the technical background makes you more credible to your coworkers, who will mostly be engineers. (That said, I don't have an engineering background - I studied Chinese language and public policy undergrad at UNC Chapel Hill.)
In lieu of a technical background, having a passion for the industry and being hyper-aware of trends and key players are big assets. Things are changing all the time, so knowing the best news outlets, blogs, Twitter feeds, etc. is an immensely valuable resource to bring to your summer employer (SpaceXers follow Space News very closely). Being knowledgable about popular abbreviations (for me, it's ITAR, COTS, CCDev, NRO, ULA, SLS, KSC, LEO, HEO, and more!) and nicknames ("the Cape" is my favorite so far) is half the battle. I had started collecting news clippings last July, expecting they would be a good resource for my MA International Studies capstone project on first mover advantage in the human space travel industry, and I have also leveraged that database for an independent study and communications class last semester and for this recruiting prep. Looking back, integrating recruiting prep with my academic coursework was a major time saver - it took some extra planning upfront, but was worthwhile.
Also, a quirk of the aerospace industry is the importance of citizenship. Due to national security concerns, rocket manufacturing is probably the most highly regulated industry sectors in the US, and having foreign citizenship would quickly hinder your career progression. Among Americans, having a military/intelligence background (ideally with a security clearance) would be an advantageous differentiator, since most executives in the industry today started out in the Dept of Defense and the DoD remains Customer #1. The aerospace industry is very veteran-friendly.
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We hope that these profiles will be helpful resources during your business school journey.
