Abbey Cahill is a Corporate and Product Marketing Intern at MuleSoft
MuleSoft’s tagline “Connect Anything, Change Everything” struck a chord the first time I heard it. I’m a student at Dartmouth, where I study English and Studio Art, both subjects that seemingly have nothing to do with enterprise software. Everyone who knows me well was surprised that I was so excited about API-led connectivity that I applied for a corporate and product marketing internship at MuleSoft.
But here’s why: I’ve always been interested in the way that connected parts make up a whole. I love Diebenkorn’s “Ocean Park” series and Euan Uglow’s still life paintings, where modular parts converge into full paintings. When I write, I keep a notebook of vignettes and fragments to incorporate into finished pieces. When I brainstorm for an essay, I cut up my drafts and piece them back together until the order makes sense. I learned a word for this at MuleSoft: “composability.”
It never struck me that entire companies are striving to become composable, and that we can help them do it. Huge corporations with years of systems and processes in place are taking a massive leap, challenging themselves to think creatively about speed and innovation. With customers ranging from government agencies to retailers to banks to healthcare providers, MuleSoft sits at the intersection of thousands of possibilities, and I wanted to be right there in the middle of it.
This is my 9th week here, and my MuleSoft internship experience has already exceeded my expectations. From my very first day at the headquarters in San Francisco, I was treated like a full-time employee––charged with creating and executing my own integrated marketing campaign.
I conducted a competitor media coverage audit and identified an opportunity for content surrounding our learning and development initiatives. Working with Catherine Avendano, our head of Learning and Organizational Development, I landed a piece in Entrepreneur that showcases MuleSoft’s unique approach to employee education and engagement.
Throughout my internship with the Corporate and Talent Marketing teams, I’ve led other initiatives to strengthen our employer branding––from doing an intern Instagram takeover to building the foundation of an executive speaking platform for talent and recruiting.
On the Product Marketing team, I’ve embraced a more technical role, surrounded by coworkers who have given me the confidence to pursue my interests and ask tons of questions along the way. Currently, I’m working on a sales playbook that breaks down the challenges and opportunities surrounding microservices.
Most importantly, the people I work with care about each other and encourage intellectual curiosity both within and away from the workplace. At lunch one day, I listened to coworkers swap scuba-diving certification stories.
Another day, Uri Sarid, our CTO, introduced us to Israeli soup nuts that were so delicious that everyone had to go back for seconds. During a marketing offsite, I told a coworker that I study studio art, and he shared a link to his own art gallery, promising to give my friend and me tickets to the SF MoMa.
If I’ve learned anything here, it’s that Muleys are good humans who challenge each other to do their best work.
In the end, I know that my experience only provides a small glimpse into the internship program here at MuleSoft, so I wanted to share what some of our other MuleSoft interns are doing this summer. Check out what they had to say:
Rahul Sengupta, Account Development Intern
“Like most college students, I wanted to work somewhere where I’d have a tangible impact. I heard about MuleSoft at a Cal Poly career fair, and it immediately caught my interest. Sales seemed like an exciting place to start a career because it would allow me to measurably add to the growth of a company, while learning about other companies across industries. On the Account Development team, doing account research and uncovering a buyer’s motivations is almost like detective work!
My internship experience has been an incredible challenge so far because MuleSoft entrusts its interns with the same responsibilities as full-time field employees. For example, each sales intern is expected to generate real prospect opportunities, reaching at least 50% of the monthly quota for full-time employees. After a full month of training, this is my first week making cold calls on my own.
You definitely have to face some initial nerves, but you become more comfortable with each call and email. It’s a huge growth experience; you learn a lot about yourself.”
Ashley Simons, UX Intern
“This is my second internship at MuleSoft! People here genuinely care about supporting your personal career goals. I study math, computer science and history at Pomona, but I’d always wanted to take business classes. When I enrolled in Dartmouth’s Tuck Business Bridge Program, MuleSoft was happy to create a flexible schedule that fit both experiences into my summer.
The mentorship culture here is incredibly supportive. My manager and two closest teammates are women in technical roles, which has been empowering as a woman in STEM.
Eventually, I’d like to be a Product Manager. UX is a really fascinating component of the product team, which enables me to follow the user experience journey. Right now, I’m working on a project to help us better understand the Anypoint Platform onboarding process.
I get to study new users who have never touched MuleSoft products before and observe exactly how they learn to use our technology. For example, I’ve been running tests internally with some of our new developers who haven’t spent much time with the platform.
This week, I’m interviewing a range of different users to collect their stories and develop generic user types or ‘personas.’ These user personas will help us better understand the varying needs of our customers.”
Jimmy Yan, Analytics Intern
“I study computer engineering at UCSD, so I wanted to get a real world engineering experience this summer. Data analytics seemed especially interesting to me because it allows you to draw insights that no person can come up with on their own.
A backend analytics position like this isn’t something you’d normally get to work on as a student in school, especially because you need lots of data to really test if your system scales. At MuleSoft, I get access to a huge reserve of interesting data.
I’m actually building one of our systems right now, which means a lot of learning and a lot of looking through other people’s code to figure out what’s going on. Plus, there’s definitely a strong mentorship culture here. That’s one of my favorite parts about MuleSoft and the internship.”
Daniel McCormick, Account Development Intern
Watch Daniel take over USC Admission’s Snapchat to provide insight into his MuleSoft internship experience!
Like what you heard? Check out our intern and new grad positions or explore all open positions in Marketing, Account Development, and Engineering & Product Management.
