For Season 2, Episode 14 of the STEAM Boston Podcast, we featured Ashley Lim, our new Business Operations Intern for the summer. Ashley will be working with Will Ma and Kunle Lawal this summer on creating job search tools that will help students and young professionals make their job search easier. Listen to the podcast to learn more about Ashley landed an internship through social media via our free resume review. She also shares advice for college students at the end.
Audio Transcript
Will Ma:
Hello, welcome to the STEAM Boston Podcast. This is Will Ma, the co-founder of careerbyte. In this episode, we’ll talk to our intern. Intern? We have an intern? Since when?
Ashley Lim:
Hi, I’m Ashley and I’m the business operations intern.
Will Ma:
You heard that right. We have a business operations intern, Ashley Lim from Babson College. What does the role of a business operations intern entail? We were looking for someone that worked with me and our fellow co-founder and COO, Kunle Lawal, more on the business strategy and business operations side, so more like a product management side. This summer, we were focused on changing careerbyte to be more technology-oriented. We wanted to focus on creating job search tools that will help you with career exploration. Yes, we did start off careerbyte as a blog. We did stories and career advice, but we do want to focus more product-focused, creating job search tools. The blog, yes, it does help us on the SEO end for the product. Job search tools, I’m very invested in creating tools that can basically help you find a job easier and land you the job of your dreams, honestly. Yeah, so stay tuned and listen to the podcast.
Will Ma:
Ashley, tell us a little bit more about yourself.
Ashley Lim:
Yeah, I’m Ashley. I am a sophomore. I’m going to be a sophomore at Babson College, which is in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Basically, I submitted my resume through careerbyte’s free resume review, which I highly recommend. From there, I was connected with Will who’s the co-founder and the interviewer today. From there, we talked about my resume and then got talking about a summer internship, and then now I’m here.
Will Ma:
A question that I had for Ashley was, how does being a business operations intern at careerbyte compare to your previous internships? What did you do?
Ashley Lim:
Inventory and stuff like that, but here, I basically just got to do the digital work.
Will Ma:
If we don’t really know about the careerbyte team is we love to travel. We’ve been to road trips. We’ve traveled all the way to New York City, Baltimore, Philadelphia, altogether. We love traveling internationally. The question I’ll ask Ashley, what’s one place you want to travel to?
Ashley Lim:
Probably Spain, because I took Spanish in high school, I mean, since kindergarten I think, so that’d be awesome. Trying some good food.
Will Ma:
You heard it here first. Ashley wants to go to Spain, future Barcelona trip for careerbyte? Maybe. Another fun question that I have is, have you met any celebrities before? I know for me, the closest encounter to meeting a celebrity is I attended a session where Jack Dorsey was there. Jack Dorsey is CEO of Twitter and Square. It was actually at a NSBE Convention, and I saw Jack Dorsey on the pamphlet and I was like, “What? The CEO of Twitter?”
Ashley Lim:
Jack Black. Jack Black and Conan O’Brien, yeah.
Will Ma:
Did you meet Jack Black and Conan O’Brien at the same time?
Ashley Lim:
Different times. Yeah. Jack Black was in Universal Studios. We were just walking and then he was with his kids, and we were like, “Whoa,” because he had some security. And then, Conan O’Brien, we went to a show, my friend.
Will Ma:
What extra curricular activities are you involved at Babson?
Ashley Lim:
Babson has a special interest housing and one of them is called eTower. It’s the entrepreneurial tower, and basically I joined in about March 2020 was when they told me that I was accepted. I’ve been living there with a community of about 20 kids starting in fall and we center around just helping people who really want to build a start-up or just learn more about entrepreneurship. We got plenty of resources, including one of the school actually recently got a fund from Home Depot of $50 million, so that’s being put towards helping us with our entrepreneurial goals. We’re having a new village, I think too, so it’s like a whole new complex is even going to be built around helping us with start-ups and all that kind of jazz.
Will Ma:
What career advice do you have for students that are currently quarantined at home?
Ashley Lim:
Even hop on LinkedIn, if you want. Try and see people who are in your grade or your upperclassmen too. Try and connect with as many people as you can, I guess. Now’s the time because you have … Presumably, you have more time to … Free time, I guess. Make connections. Also just look up professors because something I’ve found is that your professors, they’re not just professors. They have a whole history of things that they’ve done themselves and they could be of really great help to you outside of the classroom, so yeah, that’s my tips.
Will Ma:
Well, we made it to the end. Thank you for listening to the STEAM Boston Podcast. And I want to thank Ashley once again for taking her time and her opportunity to be on the podcast. Follow us at careerbyte. Give us five stars on Apple podcasts. That’ll be really helpful. Thank you, and stay tuned. Visit steamboston.com, if you want to read career advice and stories.
