Tiffany’s Internship Experience At Zendy

My name is Tiffany Rakotonirina, and I am a NYU Abu Dhabi student from Madagascar. I am currently majoring in Interactive Media with a minor in Social Research & Public Policy, with a particular interest in User Interface/User Experience, Human-Computer Interaction, and product design. When I started my internship at Zendy, I had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted to get out of it. I wanted to understand digital marketing in an actual working environment: how content is planned, how SEO works, and what actually goes into communicating a product.

Over these three months, I worked across social media, content planning, SEO, and blogs. I also spent a lot of time getting to know Zendy itself: its products, its audience, and the research space it operates in.

That part ended up being just as important as the marketing work.

During my time here, I realized it is surprisingly difficult to create good content for something you don’t fully understand. Before I could decide what Zendy should be talking about, I had to understand what it was offering and, more importantly, who it was offering it to. Zendy has a pretty broad audience. A student searching for a paper isn’t necessarily looking for the same thing as a researcher, librarian, or academic institution. Once that became clear, content stopped being about simply finding something interesting to post.

The question became: why would this person care?

I actually started catching myself asking that while working on ideas. A topic could sound great internally and still not be particularly useful to the person on the other side of the screen. Sometimes an idea needed a completely different angle. Sometimes it was better to move on.

That was probably the most valuable habit I developed during the internship: thinking about the person before thinking about the output.

It was also one of the things I enjoyed most about working at Zendy. There was so much room to ask questions, suggest ideas, and actually be part of those conversations. I wasn’t just handed tasks to complete. I could bring something to the table, hear what others thought, make changes, and see how that  idea developed. That made the experience feel much more collaborative and gave me a better sense of how work happens in an actual team.

As an Interactive Media student at NYU Abu Dhabi, my main interests are mostly in User Interface/User Experience (UI/UX) and product design, so I found myself making connections to those areas throughout the internship. The same thinking applies when designing a product. A feature might seem obvious to the person who built it. A layout might look great to the designer.  But what matters is whether it makes sense to the person using it.

Marketing gave me a different opportunity to practice that kind of thinking. It taught me to pay attention to context before making decisions, rather than assuming that what makes sense to me will automatically make sense to someone else. And so, that is what I’ll probably remember most about my time at Zendy. Not one particular post, keywords search, or blog, but learning to pause before creating and ask a better question.

Who is this for, and why should they care?