So long and thank you, interns!

Can it be?

Another summer has gone by and that means we also must say so long to our interns. This year, we said hello to our biggest group yet. They certainly didn’t waste any time in exploring their new habitat, making friends, having fun, learning from their mentors and most importantly, getting to work on some pretty awesome things.

Before sending them back to campus though, we asked them to share some experiences from their summer at SurveyMonkey. Here, in their own words, is the 2013 class of interns!

After a few days of settling in, it was full speed ahead. I was designing surveys, learning the SurveyMonkey platform hands-on, and studying survey methodology. I dove right into learning the basics of SEO and began working on and implementing our German link building campaign. Researching HR firms and bloggers to try and establish sponsorships and run advertising campaigns was another to-do project of mine. My marketing mentors all worked so hard to make sure I understood what was going on and the underlying reasons in every move we made. They were all incredibly open, approachable, and took time out of their very busy days to answer any question or address any concerns that I had. I really do feel that I’m the luckiest intern to be able to have worked with them and thrilled that I’ll be extending my internship in order to learn even more.

I was the Sales intern for SurveyMonkey Audience and worked mainly on projects with the Sales Development team. I focused specifically on lead qualification and building an international routing strategy. On a day-to-day basis, I helped manage inbound leads–and at a higher level–worked to develop a systemized approach to our routing program. Based on metrics and team feedback, we tested out qualification processes as well as new ways to improve our conversion rates from our international customers.

This summer, I was given the project of working with SurveyMonkey’s new APIs and building a web app to allow users to export survey results into other web apps. It’s been a super fun experience and I’ve learned a ton. Getting to work with my mentors, Tim and Miles, has also been really great. I learned a lot about MVC frameworks, database management and I also got to work all over the SurveyMonkey engineering stack.

As a Computer Science major, I was definitely thrilled to join the software engineers on the mobile team. I worked specifically on the Analyze portion of the forthcoming SurveyMonkey iOS app. By the time I left, I was able to complete two features of the iOS app–the Responses section and the Send feature (the mobile version of Collect) in Analyze–before heading back east to hit the books. I’ll definitely miss everyone at the Monkey and also loved getting to flex my bocce-playing skills with the team.

I’ve been working as an intern in the Finance department here at the Monkey. Along with the Accounting and Tax teams, I worked on organizing and referencing our Foreign Entity Taxes so that in the future, past records can be easily accessed and understood when needed. Assisting our busy Accounting department in handling company expense reports was also another project of mine. Later this fall, I’m heading to Seattle for my freshman year of college where I’ll be focusing my studies on principles of leadership and business. My experience this summer at SurveyMonkey has definitely helped prepare me for the exciting road ahead.

My internship project’s focus was on creating a working prototype of the Kanzi self-learning question. By the end of the summer, I was able to finish the prototype on my local environment over five services. I also got to put it up in the SurveyMonkey test environment in order to see what worked and what didn’t. Working with my mentor, Dave, has been an invaluable experience and I learned a lot while I was here. I’m off to New Delhi for a month and then back to school I go.

In between hiking, binge-watching 90s TV sitcoms and working on aerial fabrics, I’m also a PHd candidate in Political Science. It was really great to take a break from the academic life and join the team at SurveyMonkey for the summer. While there, I worked on developing an internal tool to manage SurveyMonkey's Question Bank.

As the Business Intelligence intern, I focused on building and automating reports that keep track of key performance indicators (KPI). I analyzed different product metrics in order to study different use cases and then provide recommendations to better improve our products. Digging deep into the huge amounts of data that we collect was not only fun but definitely educational. Discovering trends and providing insights to fix, grow and better our business has been a fantastic learning experience for me.

I’m a computer science major with a focus in human computer interaction (HCI). My interests lie somewhere between engineering and products. I love to move fast and so I very much enjoyed the exciting atmosphere and quick pace at SurveyMonkey. I was a product management intern and got to work on a wide variety of things like helping make surveys fully accessible and working on the releases for some new features internationally. I also helped design a new sign-up workflow. Learning how to make awesome products and having a great experience working with other product managers, engineers, and UX designers were the biggest lessons I learned and I’ll miss everyone.

Thanks from all of us to our amazing interns! We wish ’em the very best and we’ll definitely miss having their energy around the office (not to mention the extra fun treats and pizza days).

If you’re interested in checking out our career opportunities, don’t forget to visit our Jobs page.