A Snappy Summer

Written by Kaela Griswold, #WakeEntrepreneur and Summer Intern 

My name is Kaela Griswold and I am a rising senior at Wake Forest University. I am originally from outside of Philadelphia, but this summer I wanted to live in NYC to see if it would be a place I could see myself post-graduation. I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to be a Marketing/Sales intern for SnappyScreen. Dan Cohen, who I have the pleasure of having as my entrepreneurship minor advisor, suggested I take a look into SnappyScreen, even before I knew it was offered as an internship. He said that Kristen, the founder and CEO of SnappyScreen, has one of the greatest go-getter attitudes he’s ever seen. He said she is so resilient and he was always so impressed with her when he was mentoring her as a student at Cornell and beyond. He said I would be able to learn a lot from her, and I believe that will prove true far and beyond anything I could have ever imagined. But there isn’t just one power house entrepreneur in the family; her older sister, Katelyn, joined the company as COO, who I have been working closely with this first week here.

The thing that excites me the most about this internship is getting to have a first hand look into a for-profit business that a woman entrepreneur imagined, created, and made her life. Being surrounded by empowering women in a work environment is exactly the kind of space I am hoping to learn in and grow from at this stage in my life. I am also really excited to work with a small team and be able to be constantly very engaged and involved. 

I have several passions, including non-profits and working with children, however I wanted to explore the other side of my passions being entrepreneurship. I find it so exciting to be able to claim an idea as your own, put in good and earnest work, and ideally see it come to fruition. I think finding a need and figuring out how it can benefit others or a community is where my real drive lies. Social entrepreneurship is extremely rewarding in my opinion and it’s something that I’d love to continue with post-college. But I also wanted to expand my skill set and learn more about sales and marketing to better understand the overall facets of business itself. The great thing about entrepreneurship is you have to be a master of all trades in most cases so I am looking to Kristen and Katelyn as role models and examples of this mastery. 

I had the privilege of interning with Make-A-Wish last summer as a Volunteer Resources intern, performing lots of outreach to the volunteers in the Metro and Western New York areas to make sure that they were moving along smoothly with their assigned wish(s). I helped do some design work for the wish granting team and called perspective wish families for medical outreach to tell them that their child had been granted eligibility to receive a wish. I believe that my experience with past work along with the way I was raised allows me to bring a sense of efficiency and push for perfection towards everything I do. Other skills I will be bringing to this internship are communication, which I find to be essential in any work setting, as well as being detail oriented. With some of the sales work I will be doing, I hope my approachability will come across over the phone to respective hotels we may be partnering with in the future. 

This week, being the first week, my team of interns and I have devised a presentation that we gave today to Kristen and Katelyn that proposed two separate locations/venues for an event they are looking to hold in July. This event will be a team run effort by all of the interns which will be a great opportunity for collaborative work. On the sales side of things, I have a weekly meeting with the rest of the sales team. I am assigned an island a week to find new 5 star hotels with over 100+ rooms as potential prospect locations for Snappyscreen. Later this week, we are having individual meetings to learn of our specific projects geared towards our skill sets which I am exciting to find out.

I look forward to getting to know my fellow interns more and help to foster an environment that is a cohesive work space where we are able to each be leaders in our own ways and help each other in the process. I have already been able to witness some of the entrepreneurial skills that I’ve learned about in class, first-hand from both Kristen and Katelyn, so I am feeling lucky to have them as current and hopefully future mentors. Overall, I’m hoping to bring a positive energy to this startup and dedicate my summer to helping in any way I can.