Internship Spotlight: Emma Thornton ’27, Nike
Emma Thornton ’27 had big questions about her professional future. An internship on the footwear company’s global supply chain team helped her answer them.
Internship: Nike, Beaverton, Oregon (commuting from Portland)
Hometown: Trumbull, Connecticut
Pronouns: she/her/hers
The SOM classes you’re using on the job: State & Society, The Global Macroeconomy
Go-to work lunch: Something new every day on Nike’s campus!
After-work routine: Lifting at a Nike gym and catching a World Cup game at a bar in Portland
Favorite thing about internship city: Oh, I can’t choose—Portland’s food scene is world-class, I got to explore stunning PNW landscapes every weekend, and the city has such a quirky, homey vibe.
I started this summer looking for answers to two big questions: what it takes to run a global supply chain, and whether I could see myself living in the Pacific Northwest (PNW). Nike was the obvious place to test both. Few companies operate supply chains at Nike’s scale and complexity, and the company has a long history of sustainability leadership in the footwear industry. Just as importantly, Nike’s world headquarters is right in the middle of the region I wanted to explore. Verdict on the PNW: I love it.
I interned with Nike’s global supply chain team in footwear strategic sourcing. My project centered on Nike’s footwear manufacturing network: I designed a framework for the team to explore the network’s future evolution, which meant interviewing over 30 people across the company and its footwear value chain, researching the competitive landscape and the macroeconomic forces shaping global supply chains right now, and digging deep into the company’s own history. Along the way, I also spent time with Nike’s traceability director and responsible sourcing leads to learn how a company operating at this scale manages environmental and social impacts across a vast supplier network.
Nike knows how to run an internship program, and the fun of “making sport an everyday habit”—one of Nike’s core visions—made this a summer I won’t forget. I became fast friends with about 40 other grad interns, who came from MBA programs across the country and were spread across nearly every function at Nike. We had fireside chats with CEO Elliott Hill and COO Venkatesh Alagirisamy, training sessions on Nike’s history and the mechanics of its global supply chain, athlete visits (truly, parties) with stars like Alysa Liu, and plenty of opportunities to play sports at the facilities around campus. I happened to be there during the World Cup, and pockets of campus turned into big screening parties; it was surreal to walk down the hall and hear the whole place erupt over every goal as the tournament got closer to the finals. The footwear sourcing team also welcomed me completely, even inviting me into sessions at the Bowerman Footwear Lab, where I got to build a Nike sneaker from scratch—easily one of my favorite and most eye-opening experiences of the summer.
Part of what made the summer successful was how quickly I grasped major components of the business and ways of working, which I wouldn’t have been able to do without SOM. I had expected Operations Engine to be the class I’d lean on the most this summer, but I ended up pulling from across most of the core curriculum. State & Society and The Global Macroeconomy gave me the historical and economic grounding to understand what Nike’s supply chain needs to anticipate next, and I kept coming back to lessons from Executive and Investor as I thought about how to make my final project land with leadership and shareholders. It became very clear to me why SOM builds an integrated curriculum in the first place: While on the job, I ended up using all of those perspectives simultaneously.
While Nike is based in Beaverton, I decided to live in Portland with a friend-of-a-friend connection I made through Yale. Two of my favorite things in the world are food and nature, so Portland was the ideal home base for me. Outside of my connections at Nike, I also met several SOM alums in Portland over the summer, including Lydia Jackson, Elliot Mainzer, and Erik Wohlgemuth, along with incoming student Claire Winthrop. It was really cool to see how the SOM community extends to the other side of the country.
More importantly, this internship validated where I'm headed after graduation. As a joint-degree student at the Yale School of the Environment, I spent last year exploring community and NGO perspectives on responsible sourcing, including advising farmers on agroforestry projects in the Dominican Republic, building sustainable markets with communities in Zambia, and outlining strategies for soy traceability in Brazil. I came to Nike wanting to see how that kind of work operates inside a massive corporate system. What surprised me most was how much of it still comes down to relationships: Even a company of over 70,000 people runs on trust between corporate teams and supply chain partners. And because corporate responsibility has been a priority at Nike for decades, sustainability is present in functions across the business, not just those with sustainability in the title.
I left more convinced than ever that I want to build a career in responsible sourcing for a global company, and this summer gave me a much more concrete sense of what the business side of that looks like. Talking with Nike’s CSO and VP of footwear supply chain, along with people in the roles I eventually want to hold, only made me more excited about where I’m heading. After ten weeks with Nike, the answers to my two big questions are definitely yes and yes.
