This is the second in a series of stories about Bellisario College students completing summer internships.
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Coming out of high school in India, Vrinda Agarwal was ready to step 8,000 miles out of her comfort zone.
A born introvert, Agarwal decided attending college at a university she’d never heard of in a country she’d never been to was the best opportunity to redefine herself.
“I wanted to go somewhere where I didn’t know anyone. I found Penn State and liked the program,” she said. “Here I was a blank slate, and I liked that.”
Sight unseen, she decided on the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications, and just a week before her first semester began in 2019, she took her first step onto American soil.
Three years later, she has built an impressive resume, which includes several student groups and internships, while working toward two degrees — public relations and human centered design and development. Agarwal also has helped to make the Bellisario College a better place for international students like herself.
This summer, she is interning with Edelman DXI, a company that processes the data and analytics for the global communications firm Edelman. Over the next couple of months, she will work with the company’s audience insights team, which is a part of Edelman DXI’s marketing operation.
“The team does audience profiling and segmentation for its clients,” Agarwal said. Her work gives organizations a “detailed idea of who their audience is and how they can reach them most effectively.”