Internship Spotlight: Kaivan Shroff '17
What are you doing this summer? We asked rising second-year MBA students to check in from their summer internships, where they are applying the lessons of their first year at Yale SOM.
Kaivan Shroff ’17
Internship: Focus Features, Los Angeles
Home country/state: Westchester, New York
Favorite SOM class: Managing Education Reform
My summer at NBCUniversal's Focus Features has been unlike any of my past work experiences.
My goal in pursuing a production internship at a leading film company was to ensure that I had an opportunity to test out the various concepts learned during the first year of my MBA program in a more creative environment. It has been great to learn about how stakeholder management, risk assessment, budgeting, and deal-making work in an area that I have always been passionate about.
NBCUniversal is also the largest company I have worked for, and another benefit of the experience has been watching how a such a large company is able to foster a sense of unity among its various subsidiaries and implement expansive, progressive policy initiatives. Though NBCUniversal is large, Focus Features is a mid-sized organization with engaged and energetic leadership.
This has been a perfect balance in that my internship has offered insight into the workings of a mega-corporation, while at the same time I have been able to benefit from weekly intern seminars with Focus executives, where we can ask industry leaders direct questions about their field. As someone keenly interested in social media and engagement, I knew I picked the right place from day one when they handed all the interns selfie sticks and encouraged us to use the special Snapchat filter they had developed just for orientation!