MBA Life at LinkedIn

Editor’s Note: This is part of a series of blog posts by LinkedIn’s amazing summer interns. Today, we hear from Lucy Zang who is working toward her MBA at Harvard Business School.

This is not my first job, but I certainly felt like a newbie on my first day at LinkedIn. Everything was brand new to me, from carrying my new LinkedIn backpack to catching the work shuttle to walking around a beautiful campus surrounded by people who seemed truly proud and happy to work here. I thought to myself, “Is this a mirage?” because I came from an industry where a good number of people worked long hours and disliked their jobs. I was excited for the summer, and happy to be a part of LinkedIn’s first official season of the MBA Internship Program. Coming to work in jeans and a t-shirt everyday made me even more grateful.

After nearly two months at LinkedIn, I am still intrigued by my work on the Sales Operations team. There are tons of projects for me to work on, from strengthening LinkedIn’s product offerings in different regions to improving the efficiency of the ordering process. While our engineers are hard at work creating the products and the sales team is building relationships with customers, my team is helping the sales team increase their effectiveness and productivity. We ask a lot of questions, and usually answer them leveraging the sea of rich data that LinkedIn has. Even though business schools don’t teach us how to code, they do give us powerful analytical tools that have proved applicable and invaluable for my current role.

For those looking for complete order and structure, LinkedIn may not be that place, but that's what makes every day so exciting for me. I’m given plenty of freedom to work on new things and chart my own career. LinkedIn has done a great job maintaining a "start-up" feel even though we have thousands of employees globally. Employees still speak up at all-hands meetings and no suggestion is too small for senior management’s attention. The hypergrowth doesn’t make people here complacent. In fact, LinkedIn keeps rolling out new products and better user experiences for all its members. No wonder tech companies have become business school students’ new favorite industry. I am lucky to live and breathe the rare combination of passion, innovation and dedication everyday at LinkedIn.