June 21, 2023

I have been with ADM for about a month now in the office, and the experience has been amazing so far!

During the past month, I have had time to learn and grow in my career development, as well as getting to meet new people everyday and understand the scope of ADM. During my first week at ADM, my manager Jacquelyn outlined a 30-60-90 day plan with me to goal set from a managerial perspective and review expectations. The outline was as follows:

1) Meet People: PNS & Savory Team, WI/TX & SG&D Team, MCOE, Trade / PR, and Nutrition Teams

2) Understand Process: Administrative and Marketing

3) Own Key Projects in the Global Protein Product and Savory Segment:

• Update ADM Protein Product Pages

• Create Value Propositions and Sales Enablement for Protein in Pet Food

• Support I2L Ideation Session

• Help Build Product Marketing Academy

• Update Competitive Analysis

• And more!

With these goals outlined, I knew I would stay buys throughout the last month and will continue to stay busy! My two largest projects this summer are updating the Protein Product pages for ADM's website and creating value propositions and bridging the gap for ADM between alternative proteins and pet food.

With these benchmarks in mind and as I started to settle in to this new internship and environment, I set some goals for myself:

1) Gain 50 new LinkedIn connections. With this goal, I plan to use it as a system to keep track of everyone I meet. So far, I am at 28 connections and counting!

2) For Protein Product pages, dig into A/B testing and results to show improvement. This goal will help me to keep track of my results, as well as learn some SEO components. This is something that I've always wanted to do, but never got the chance!

3) Create Value Propositions for Pet Food & Protein by end of internship. While this goal is achievable, I want to make sure I am doing the best that I can in gathering materials and presenting it at the end of my internship to make sure I am well informed on the topic.

4) For the Competitive Analysis, make a document that serves a purpose and has value for the internal teams. This document has not been updated in a few years, and I want the information to be through a lot of personal interviews that I do during my time with ADM.

These goals will help me quantify my internship and make sure to get the most out of my (hopefully) last internship before I find a full-time position and graduate college!

So far, the most interesting thing to me about ADM is its cross-functional attribute. I work with people from all over the globe and from every function of the business. I am on calls with people from Europe, Asia, or Latin America almost daily in my position, which is something that I did not think I would get to experience so early in my career. Even though my title says Savory and Proteins, I work with people from Pet Food, Sweet Goods & Dairy, Nutrition, and Health & Wellness often.

Another note that I have made so far at ADM is how connected to the work I am doing I am. It is an interesting perspective coming from the college of business and previous internships where most of the people who I interacted with were either Sales, Marketing, or businesspeople in some way. At ADM, I sit on the 3rd floor above 2 floors of flavor development labs and to the right of a massive flavor production facility. I have gotten to taste test new flavors, unreleased sports drinks, and toured the manufacturing floor donned in a lab coat, safety goggles, ear plugs, and steeled toed boots with loud noises and an odd smells from the mix of flavors. I feel as though I know as much about the manufacturing side of things as much as I know about marketing the specific products.