Internship Spotlight: Yiyang He ’26, UPS
Yiyang He ’26 spent his summer helping a major logistics company improve its pricing strategy across the U.S.
Internship company and location: United Parcel Service (UPS), Atlanta, Georgia
Hometown: Cary, North Carolina
Pronouns: he/him/his
The SOM classes you’re using on the job: Basics of Economics, Customer
Go-to work lunch: Fried chicken and mac-n-cheese from the office café
After-work routine: Lift weights and try different restaurants around the city
Favorite thing about internship city: Atlanta is a very diverse city with lots to do. I spent my free time going for walks in Piedmont Park; attending Atlanta United and Braves games; and visiting shops along the Beltline, a loop of parks and outdoor space that connects the entire city. The food scene is also underrated, with many good Asian restaurants throughout the city.
I spent my summer as an MBA marketing intern at UPS, a Fortune 50 logistics company that operates in over 200 countries. The company ships anything and everything you can think of, from e-commerce goods to vaccines to raw materials for manufacturing.
I was drawn to UPS because it is a customer-centric company that offers a service that is critical to the modern global economy. Prior to enrolling at SOM, I worked at a digital marketing agency, helping enterprise clients optimize their marketing budgets and improve return on investment for their advertising. While the work was interesting and taught me a lot, I was often removed from the end consumer and found myself wanting more insight into what customers experienced on a day-to-day basis. By joining UPS, I hoped to get a behind-the-scenes look at a company that connects with billions of customers, both physically and digitally. I also wanted to build skills and become a more well-rounded marketer.
I joined the revenue strategy team at UPS, where I worked on a project focused on pricing opportunities within the Digital Access Program (DAP), a technology service that partners with e-commerce platforms like Amazon and Shopify to allow businesses and consumers to ship with UPS directly within those platforms. My teammates have been supportive throughout the internship, helping me get up to speed on the business and introducing me to knowledgeable people across the organization who have helped me learn more about the different business units at UPS.
My primary task involved analyzing competitive position based on transit times. I compiled transit data for all zip codes across the U.S. and compared UPS services against competitors to identify regions where we offered faster and slower delivery times. I then launched experiments to test new price points in these regions based on delivery speed differences and measured the impact on performance before presenting results and final recommendations to senior leaders across the company.
The internship has presented an interesting opportunity to apply learnings from the core curriculum at SOM in a business environment. Concepts we learned in the course Basics of Economics, like price elasticity and consumer demand, are relevant to my project. I’ve used my newfound understanding of drivers of supply and demand to analyze historical performance data and predict the impacts of price changes on package volume. I’ve also made use of the marketing frameworks we discussed in the core course Customer when conducting research on different products offered by UPS and key competitors; those frameworks have helped me understand how we can improve pricing strategy.
My time with UPS has also provided a good opportunity to expand my network. SOM students and alumni tend to gravitate towards hubs in the Northeast and West Coast, so it was a welcome change of pace for me to build connections in a different part of the country and meet talented individuals from MBA programs across the south. I was never too far from the SOM community, though: I got to meet up with classmates spending the summer in Atlanta, and even a recent alum.
Coming into the MBA program, I knew I wanted to end up at a company with kind and genuine people where I got to use cutting-edge technology to improve the lives of customers. UPS has provided all that and more, and I’m glad to have played a small part in improving an organization that helps make our world run smoothly.
Yiyang He is a recipient of the Zhenyi and Charles Liu ’11 MBA Alumni Fund Scholarship (2024–2025).
