MSBA Student Has Job at Amtrak

Job Report:  Samantha Donohue

Graduation has come and gone and the summer has arrived! Unlike most students I wasn't pining for a vacation on a tropical island or getting a tan. What I was highly anticipating is beginning a full time job as Interactive Media Coordinator at Amtrak. 

Throughout this year, I had the opportunity to intern with Amtrak’s eCRM (online customer relationship management) team as a business analyst under the supervision of Sebastian Pawlowski, director of eCRM at Amtrak and a lecturer at

Sebastian Pawlowski and
Samantha Donohue

Catholic University.  The eCRM department is responsible for all of Amtrak emails and the promotional banners on Amtrak.com. Through my internship I learned the significance of open, booking, and click rates as well as multiple strategies for a/b testing in marketing. From my internship experience, I knew that I enjoyed working at Amtrak, got along really well with the eCRM team, and was learning invaluable skills for someone beginning their career in online marketing.

My main responsibilities as an intern were giving a weekly report on the status of the eCRM campaigns to senior marketing officers and gathering all of the data and creative pieces for the regional report which is compiled each quarter and sent out to all of Amtrak’s field managers and state partners. From working with the data, I became familiar with Amtrak’s marketing campaigns and the processes in which creative went to market. More importantly, I came to value the story that the data provided for each campaign and I delivered actionable suggestions for changes on future campaigns.

One of the most rewarding moments since starting full time was when the Senior Marketing Officer asked me to pull together the information relating to Amtrak’s emails from the semester long competitive assessment that my classmates and I did for our field team study project. 

The capstone for the MSBA program is a semester long field team study in which you consult a company on certain problem they are having. I was appointed leader for the Amtrak team and our objective was to provide a complete competitive assessments of Amtrak’s competitors’ online messaging platforms. We looked at their websites, mobile apps, and emails and we split the different components of these platforms into categories, which we then ranked against each other. 

After all the sweat, strategizing, meetings, group chats, research, monsters, reviews, and the grand presentation our work was being put into action. This coming year, I look forward to continuing the project that my classmates and I started as well as contributing to the eCRM team that has taught me so much.    
      

 As for me, I’m staying on track with Amtrak. 

It was a delight having Sam in the program and watching her grow through her internship at Amtrak and her leadership of the Field Team Study Project we did for them.  It is really rewarding to see companies like Amtrak and Microsoft take the deliverables from these projects and put them into use.

Stewart McHie
Director, MSBA Program
mchie@cua.edu