Strategy Intern

We’ve designed our paid internship program to give you a meaningful sense of life at a strategy and design company. That means contributing to real work for real clients, participating on a dedicated and diverse team, and receiving training and mentorship to get you started in your career.

Interns will be embedded among project teams where they will experience firsthand how our work and strategic thinking is developed. SYLVAIN interns are equal thought-partners, invited to share their ideas and perspectives in internal work sessions and client meetings. We operate in the spirit of flatness and expect all teammates to speak up, contribute, ask questions, or raise concerns. 

In addition to learning by doing, we offer a rich curriculum of learning sessions, workshares, and 1:1 mentorship. You’ll also be invited to our ‘misfit’ kind of fun (team events, game nights, coffee chats, etc.) while soaking up all that an in-person office experience has to offer.

PROGRAM DETAILS

• When: June 2nd to August 8th (10 weeks, 40 hrs/wk)
• Where: New York, NY & Richmond, VA, Working from our office 3 days per week  (Tuesday through Thursday), with the option to work in-person or remotely on Mondays and Fridays
• Compensation: While designed primarily as a hands-on learning experience, this is a paid internship at $20/hr

Typical Intern Activities

• Cultural Analysis
  Share cultural examples from what you read, see, and experience in media and in your everyday life to inform and support brand and innovation ideas.
• Consumer Insight
  Analyze and define what stands out from primary and secondary research to help teams better understand what people need and how our clients can add value to their lives.
• Landscape Analysis
  Dig deep into the competitive brands and businesses in various industries to identify best practices, traps, and white space opportunities.
• Product and Service Ideation
  Participate in innovation brainstorms to come up with new ideas for products, services, and partnerships that leverage our clients’ brand equity and capabilities.

CANDIDATE CHARACTERISTICS

We’re looking for candidates who demonstrate high potential to do the kind of work we do at SYLVAIN. We are not looking for people who have necessarily mastered these skills. Rather we’re looking for folks with big imaginations, an ability to make surprising connections, and a hunger to learn. Folks who are natural problem-solvers, with a passion for work that matters, eager to work across categories and challenges, bringing ideas to life with clarity, emotion, and integrity.

Importantly, we’re looking for folks who have a desire to improve across these areas over the course of their internship.

People who thrive in this program tend to share these qualities: 

• Deep Curiosity
• Cultural IQ
• Creativity
• Empathy
• Strong communication skills
• A knack for problem-solving
• Egoless collaboration
• Resourcefulness

INTERNSHIP APPLICATION PROCESS

Timing

There are 4 stages to our candidate selection process. We typically receive a  large number of applicants, so we encourage thoughtful submissions at each stage.

• By Feb 3rd: Apply through our career page and share your interest in SYLVAIN
• Feb 7th & 10th: Selected candidates will be invited to join an optional, but highly recommended virtual information session to meet us,  learn more about the internship, and learn about the case assignment
• Feb 10th-17th: Complete a strategy case assignment to show us how you think
• Feb 26-28th: Final candidates will be invited for an interview to get to know you
• Mar 7th: Receive our decision over email

While we wish we could promise personalized follow-ups—we receive a high volume of applications and competition is stiff—however we do our best to offer some form of feedback if you don’t proceed to the next round to ensure this experience also serves you.

What to expect

We understand applying to internships takes considerable time and effort. Thank you for dedicating the time.

Applicants asked to complete the assignment stage of the process, will be given 1 week to complete a case assignment. We believe the case assignment is essential to get to know how you think as a strategist, which is why we include it in our process.

We are aware that some studios ask for assignment-style submissions in order to pad their deliverables to paying clients. This is not that. Our case assignment will be completely hypothetical and does not represent a current client challenge we are tackling.

ABOUT SYLVAIN 

SYLVAIN is a strategy and design company that makes new human and business value for the Now, Novel, and Next. Dissatisfied with the status quo, we collect unorthodox perspectives and uncommon ways of framing the future. By seeking better answers, and pushing for more purpose, we’re solving the most consequential business challenges of our time—always inspiring, inciting, and provoking progress.

Founded in
 2010, SYLVAIN is a member of kyu Collective, a group of independently-led companies that share a similar mission. We have offices in New York City, Richmond, VA, Los Angeles, CA, and Amsterdam, NL.Learn more about us at our website, or follow us on Instagram. And check out more of our thinking on our weekly newsletter: Progress Report, and our podcast: Critical Nonsense.

DIVERSITY AT SYLVAIN

SYLVAIN is committed to building and sustaining a culture that celebrates our diversity and is rooted in community. We recognize that the collective sum of individual differences, life experiences, knowledge, innovation, self-expression, and talent that our employees invest in their work represents a significant part of not only our culture, but our reputation and company’s achievement. 

As an Equal Opportunity Employer, we embrace and encourage our employees’ differences in age, race, ethnicity, disability, family or marital status, gender identity or expression, language, natural origin, religion, socio-economic status, veteran status, and other characteristics that make our employees unique. Lending such an array of qualities to our work ensures a human-centered approach to our way of doing things and treatment of each other.