Internship Spotlight: Rebeccah Musson at PepsiCo

Headshot for CBHPeer Rebeccah Musson

Rebeccah Musson

Class: Senior  Major(s): Canfield BHP and Marketing  Certificate: Sports Media  Internship: E-Commerce Intern  Company: PepsiCo

Topics of Interest: Brand Marketing, Sports Marketing, and E-Commerce

As a rising senior and marketing major pursuing a sports media certificate, Canfield BHPeer Rebeccah Musson shows us that perseverance and patience pay off. Born in the great state of Texas and raised in the Chapel Hill-Durham area of North Carolina, Rebeccah comes to us as a seasoned veteran who has dealt with change for most of her life. We caught up with Rebeccah on her experience with PepsiCo and to talk about how she has coped with working remotely after a successful summer as an E-Commerce Intern.

Starting her recruitment process off on the right foot was a bit dicey. Rebeccah admits having to do more leg work than her peers but finding alums with marketing backgrounds to get their insights on recruiting for a company like Pepsi was a task she was ready to take on.

“Recruiting for marketing is a little bit more difficult than some of the other majors. There are not as many companies that are coming to campus [for marketing], at least not to the extent of consulting for example. Within Canfield BHP, marketing is a smaller major. It took a bit of extra work to reach out to people who are marketing majors and to get their insights on how to recruit. It proved not to be too difficult once I got into it.” 

After attending a career fair at UT, Rebeccah learned about all the opportunities available within several companies that recruit at McCombs:

“For younger students, understanding that marketing is a great major, they will find that there are tons of opportunities even if all your friends are doing consulting or IB. I capitalized on the career fair for marketing because I was not aware of a lot of the companies that were recruiting. I found that there is a great variety of companies you can recruit for depending on what you are interested in.” 

Passionate about sports and brand marketing, Rebeccah saw the opportunity of a lifetime in PepsiCo:

“I remember going into the career fair already interested in Pepsi. Brand marketing is something I’m interested in as well as sports. Pepsi has a great brand and many partnerships in that space which is why I was interested in them. I started talking to them at the career fair, went to some of their events, and then applied for the internship.”

She followed the process and stuck with it. Though she ultimately did not receive an offer right away, she explains how she managed to land a spot on the PepsiCo team:

“I initially applied for marketing and went through the interview process but did not get an offer for the internship. We stayed in contact and a couple of weeks later, they reached back out and said, “We liked you. We just did not have enough positions open in marketing. We do have an e-commerce internship where you could perform marketing duties. Would you be interested in applying for that?”. Technology is where everything is going. I believe e-commerce is a super important field to be a part of right now. As soon as I got that email, I immediately capitalized on that and applied for that internship. I got an interview right away and then went down the recruiting path. It was an awesome recruiting process and they were communicative throughout it all. I think I did a good job of staying in contact with them which allowed me to stay in the running for future positions.”

Having gone through the recruitment process and landing a solid internship position on the PepsiCo team, Rebeccah found new challenges and opportunities while working remotely.

“It has been a great learning experience, working remotely. One of the challenges is just not being able to develop relationships in the same way that you usually can. Whether it was with my manager or with the other interns, I was still able to develop those relationships to a certain extent but they are never going to be as deep as they would have been if we were an office able to bounce ideas off of each other. The biggest difference is the one-off conversations or quick questions that now have to be scheduled 30-minute meetings. It makes it a lot harder to build all those relationships. I think Pepsi did a great job trying to combat that. As far as learning goes, Pepsi created some great learning platform drives for us to have weekly lessons specific to whichever leadership team member we are hearing from, which I thought was a unique way to learn about the business as a whole. Other than that, working remotely has been an interesting experience. Learning how to manage a work-life balance was probably one of the biggest takeaways I got from this summer of working in a remote internship.”

Though working remotely has its challenges, Rebeccah was happy to have a mentor that she could lean on and talk to along the way. It helped keep her connected to the company culture which can be a huge factor in a candidate’s decision to work there full-time.

“The company culture was something important to me regarding the potential of a full-time offer and moving forward with understanding the culture. In addition to my manager, they give every intern a mentor—somebody who doesn’t have an impact on your hiring decision but is there to talk to you every week. I was able to have some of those conversations [on culture] with her. They were open questions, such as “what does the work-life balance look like? What is the culture of the organization?” I was very lucky that my mentor was somebody who had worked across a lot of different areas of the business. She was able to speak to [the culture] in terms of each area of the business. In general, having a mentor who I felt I could have those open and honest conversations with really helped to understand the culture without being there in person.”

As a huge sports fan pursuing her degree in marketing, Rebeccah views her path as somewhat “untraditional” but for anyone interested in following in her footsteps and doing something a little different, her advice is to “go for it”.

“Follow your passion—do what you want to do—because ultimately, you’ll be so much happier if you pursue the passion that you’re interested in rather than just doing what everybody else is doing. As far as actually getting those internships, work your network. Continue to maintain a good relationship with every single person you talk to. Following up and sending ‘Thank You!’ emails are all super important. That was evident in how I got my internship this summer.”

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