Hello Captains! My name is Emmet Aylor, and I am a rising senior majoring in Management and Marketing from Barboursville, Virginia. This summer, I am taking part in Launch, a program organized by HackCville and founded by UVA alum. Launch takes some of the top students and trains them for four weeks in digital marketing, data science, software engineering, or user experience, and matches them with companies in Charlottesville, Richmond, Northern Virginia, or other areas to work as interns at startups or other larger businesses. Growing up around Charlottesville, I had heard about HackCville and their work, and I tried to stay connected with them to learn more about opportunities to get involved. When I found out about their Launch program, I knew it would be a very unique opportunity.

This summer, I took part in the Digital Marketing program. For the first four weeks, me and my class of around 15 other students learned about social media marketing, Google Analytics, search engine optimization, and more. Every day, we would learn about a specific skill set in the morning, and then work with a team in the afternoon on a project that applied what we learned. We would often have group presentations the next morning to showcase our work. As our final project, we were paired with a local company, and developed a digital marketing strategy to help market their product. This training portion of my internship was super valuable to me, and allowed me to learn more hard skills that I could use for a marketing position.

Last week, we finished up our training and split off into our companies. I was paired with UVA Community Credit Union, a nonprofit financial institution in Charlottesville. Coincidentally, I work with a CNU alum! Being nervous on my first day, it was such an awesome opportunity to connect with a fellow Captain. I am really excited to dive deeper into my projects over the next couple of weeks and learn more about marketing for a financial institution!