Build an AI portfolio that gets you hired

Develop a comprehensive creative strategy framework for Beats by Dre video advertising, then demonstrate its application through an original creative concept.

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• Catalog and analyze 20-30 video ads across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube into a structured, insight-ready repository.
• Design and execute a consumer survey to capture real reactions to advertising content, combined with social listening insights.
• Build a Creative Strategy Framework including platform best practices, brand creative standards, effectiveness rubric, competitive analysis, and strategic recommendations.
• Develop an original creative concept with a creative brief, framework compliance evaluation, and a 5-minute strategic presentation.

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By the end of this Externship, externs will have created:

• Ad Repository Database (20-30 tagged ads)
• Consumer Feedback Report
• Creative Strategy Framework Package
• Creative Concept Presentation

Beats by Dre, founded in 2006, is a leading audio brand known for its premium headphones, earphones, and speakers. As a company focused on innovation and customer satisfaction, Beats by Dre uses data-driven insights to ensure its products stay ahead of market trends and meet the needs of its global audience.

This externship places students in the role of a junior security consultant at vCISO Services. You will deliver the following:

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- A ten-slide audit readout, re-sequenced to open with the conclusion a client's leadership needs to hear;

- A one-page executive summary: conclusion first, method second;

- A completed 27-question customer security questionnaire, answered only with evidence you produced and mapped to NIST CSF 2.0;

- An assessment workbook with the engagement charter, asset inventory, findings register, and a consolidated, ranked risk picture.

Analyze a real multi-file dataset spanning 300+ juvenile justice facilities to develop research questions, conduct statistical analyses in Python, and deliver a professional findings package — including a written brief, data visualizations, presentation deck, and recorded presentation — that goes directly into CIYJ’s advocacy work with state agencies and legislators.

Produce a complete, self-sourced children's environmental health findings package:

1. Evaluated Dataset: a real-world public health dataset you sourced, evaluated for fitness, and cleaned for analysis
2. Defended Research Question: a focused, testable question about environmental exposures and child health outcomes in a community of your choice
3. Statistical Analysis: correlation and regression analysis run in Python, with method-selection rationale and honest interpretation
4. Stress-Tested Finding: a revised interpretation that survives a structured pitfalls checklist covering confounders, ecological fallacy, and overclaiming
5. Practitioner-Facing Presentation: a written brief, supporting chart, slide deck, and recorded presentation built for a non-technical public health audience

Deliver a professional FP&A consulting package and company valuation for Attronica:

1. Organize and analyze historical financial statements: Review Attronica’s audited financials, restructure data for clarity, and identify key trends across revenue, margins, and operating expenses.
2. Build a financial forecasting model: Develop a forward-looking financial model in Excel incorporating revenue drivers, cost assumptions, and goal-seek analysis to project multiple growth scenarios.
3. Conduct operational and competitive analysis: Evaluate Attronica’s market position within the IT hardware and services landscape, benchmarking against industry peers and identifying strategic advantages.
4. Produce a comprehensive private company valuation: Apply DCF, comparable company, and precedent transaction methodologies to arrive at a defensible valuation range supporting strategic business decisions.
5. Deliver a final strategy presentation to the CEO: Synthesize all findings into a polished slide deck presenting the FP&A assessment, valuation summary, and strategic recommendations for Attronica’s next chapter.

Design and prototype a feature aimed at boosting BeReal's monthly active users metric (MAUs). Demo and present to BeReal leadership at the end of the externship.

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Project deliverables include:

1) A visual representation of BeReal’s user behavior pattern highlighting common usage habits, motivations, and frustrations of BeReal users

2) A competitor analysis matrix highlighting engagement-driving features and gaps

3) Prototype Flow Map (photo or text storyboard) and Prototype Link (+ README with click path)

4) Focus group test summary report

5) Final feature proposal deck (5–7 slides) presenting the feature, supporting evidence, and rollout plan

Founded in France, BeReal is a fast-growing social app with 40M users worldwide. They’re changing the way people connect—by encouraging users to share a real, unfiltered glimpse of their lives every day. In a landscape dominated by filters and algorithms, BeReal is fighting to let us all be “real” again.. BeReal is betting big on genuine connection—and wants your help in crafting features that stay true to that mission while growing engagement and reach.

• Design and Run a Real Survey: Deploy it online and face to face, and collect real responses from at least 20 people.
• Analyze What You Actually Collected: Turn raw survey and interview data into real, defensible patterns.
• Benchmark the Competition: Map Generous Brands against the biggest names in the category.
• Build a Consulting-Style Recommendation: Use the Pyramid Principle to argue your case and end with a real next step.

Generous Brands, formed in 2024, owns a portfolio of premium refrigerated beverage brands built around Bolthouse Farms, Evolution Fresh, and SAMBAZON, with Health-Ade joining as its newest addition, together nearing a billion dollars in retail sales. Health-Ade itself started as a kombucha sold at a farmers market in 2012 before growing into one of the top-selling functional beverage brands in the country.

During the course of the externship, externs will:

• Analyze how case management workflows influence patient experience, continuity of care, and risk across inpatient, emergency, and post-discharge contexts.
• Identify process gaps, blind spots, and unaccounted risks by applying root cause analysis to real care coordination scenarios.
• Map real-world case management workflows to reveal hidden work, handoffs, delays, and intervention points.
• Quantify coordination work by defining operational metrics and prototyping a dashboard that communicates workload, risk mitigation, and value.
  
  

By the end of the externship, externs will have created a:

• Stakeholder map and scope-of-practice summary clarifying the case manager’s role in patient-centered care coordination.
• Workflow risk and root-cause analysis table highlighting gaps, risks, and invisible coordination work.
• Process maps and visual flowcharts showing how case management work actually unfolds across follow-up, default management, and escalation.
• Work-quantification dashboard prototype that translates coordination activities into measurable, communicable operational value.

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Tools being used: Claude, Perplexity, Gamma

The Institute of Mental Health (IMH) is Singapore’s national acute psychiatric hospital, with over 1,950 beds and a mission to deliver holistic, integrative mental healthcare. It serves children, adolescents, adults, and the elderly through multidisciplinary teams that include psychologists, nurses, occupational therapists, and social workers. IMH combines evidence-based care with operational excellence to support mental health at scale.

Create a professional slide deck and present your investment thesis to Mangusta's Partners:

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1. Source early stage startups you want to pitch: Search for and identify early-stage startups through diverse discovery methods to uncover under-the-radar companies for further evaluation.
2. Conduct comprehensive due diligence: Gather and analyze company data, including fundraising history, team composition, press coverage, and financial metrics, to build reports for investment assessment.
3. Generate and refine a targeted list of key competitors: Conduct an in-depth analysis of competitive positioning and differentiation to evaluate a startup’s potential within its market.
4. Analyze B2C traction data: Interpret key metrics such as user engagement and app downloads. Leverage and develop AI-driven strategies to help synthesize customer sentiment data to identify product strengths and areas for improvement.
5. Complete comprehensive startup analysis on core areas: This includes Market Opportunity, Technology & Core IP, Competitive Landscape, Go-to-Market Strategy, Team Assessment, and Risk Analysis, translating due diligence findings into actionable insights.
6. Produce a strategic synergy report: This report should align the startup’s potential with the VC fund’s objectives, articulating collaborative value and strategic fit.
7. Design and deliver a concise 3-slide investment memo: Deliver a polished, data-driven presentation in Google Slides to communicate key findings to potential investors as you would if you were a VC associate on the team.

Mangusta Capital is a venture capital and growth equity firm with origins in Italy, founded by SoftBank Vision Fund’s founder and backed by the family behind Ray-Ban/Oakley. The mission is to shape the world for future generations by supporting technology innovations that move humanity forward.

They invest in audacious founders building mission-critical capabilities across AI and software. As they reach the tipping point in the advent of AGI, we see the inevitability of unlocking massive productivity gains in complex workflows across all industries.

They invest in the next generation of great consumer brands and technologies enabling delightful consumer experiences. In the past, consumers trusted brands; today, consumers trust influencers. Mangusta searches for the trendsetters changing the way we eat, play, and live.

• Tear Down a Flagship Partnership: Reverse-engineer the College Board deal into its value exchange, revenue logic, and why it endures.
• Benchmark the Peers: Study how Wikimedia, Coursera, Duolingo and Mozilla turn free reach into revenue, and which models fit a nonprofit.
• Source Two Real Deals: Find two partnerships you are convinced Khan Academy should do next, and build the case for each.
• Pitch the Recommendation: Build an executive pitch deck covering both deals, and name which to pursue first.

Externs will analyze publicly available reviews and testimonials from Amazon Fulfillment Center employees (via Glassdoor, Indeed, Reddit, and YouTube) to identify common workplace pain points—such as communication gaps, lack of recognition, or burnout. 

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After identifying a key theme, each extern will select a key employee persona and explore how that issue uniquely affects them. You'll thendesign a persona-specific solution that a team leader could use to improve the associate experience.

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• User insight synthesis
• Qualitative analysis and data-backed storytelling
• Operational problem framing
• Business-ready recommendation design
• Presentation to Amazon

Amazon Fulfillment Centers are the backbone of Amazon’s logistics network, serving as massive, high-tech warehouses where customer orders are received, stored, picked, packed, and shipped. These facilities are integral to Amazon's ability to offer rapid delivery services, including same-day and two-day shipping.

Deliver a working analytics database and a clear, data-backed recommendation that tells Breaking Games where to spend and where to pull back.

• Load and explore the raw data: Get six separate data files into a database and write your first queries — feeling firsthand why messy, disconnected data is so hard to work with.
• Design a database that connects the data: Structure proper tables, link them with keys, and join them to follow one customer’s journey from first ad click to purchase.
• Find out what’s actually selling: Rank the full product catalog by what drives revenue, build summary tables, and turn the numbers into a clear restock recommendation.
• See which marketing is working: Clean hundreds of messy traffic sources into tidy channels, then calculate which ads and channels actually pay off.
• Investigate why carts get abandoned: Dig into thousands of abandoned carts, uncover which “shoppers” are bots skewing the numbers, and calculate the real abandonment rate.
• Build a dashboard and make your recommendation: Pull everything into a clean, shareable HTML dashboard and make your case to the team.

Breaking Games is the publishing arm of AdMagic—the powerhouse behind hits like Cards Against Humanity and Exploding Kittens. But they’re more than just a traditional publisher. They help invent, test, launch, and distribute both their own games and others’, working across the entire tabletop ecosystem. This externship offers a rare peek behind the scenes of how digital marketing powers the business side of play.

Investment memo you’ll have a chance to present to the Investment Partner for investment consideration.

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• Startup Sourcing: Learn how to find new, innovative tech startups using online tools.
• Company Research: Conduct research on potential startups, looking at things like their market and finances.
• Competitor Analysis: Research competitors in the same market to see how the startups compare.
• Investment Memo: Summarize your findings in reports that highlight key insights and recommendations.

HP Tech Ventures is the venture capital arm of HP Inc. Operating across teams in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv, HP Tech Ventures is fostering an ecosystem of innovation and reinvention that will define tomorrow’s world and experiences.

This externship places students in the role of cybersecurity engineers protecting IoT pipelines. You will deliver the following:

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- AI-driven anomaly detection prototype for identifying suspicious device behavior;

- A structured security review of IoT pipelines;

- Practical playbooks and runbooks adapted for engineering teams;

- Design recommendations for securing critical water shutoff controls;

- A mock incident response report highlighting risks and mitigations.

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Tools you'll be learning and using:

- Python

- Mosquitto (MQTT Broker)

- Streamlit

By the end you will deliver a Security Improvement Report to Hydroficient that provides them risk insights, documentation, and design recommendations that better protect their systems. Through this, you gain practical, portfolio-ready cybersecurity and AI skills.

Hydroficient is a climate technology company building automated systems to optimize water usage in commercial and industrial buildings across North America. Their research shows that up to 95% of buildings are over-serviced, meaning excess water flows every time a tap runs. Hydroficient’s IoT-enabled HydroLogic platform dynamically adjusts water delivery based on actual demand, typically reducing water consumption and sewage output by around 20%. Awarded the Canadian Federal Government’s ElevateIP Grant, Hydroficient works with major restaurant chains, hotels, gyms, schools, and other large facilities used by millions of people every day.

• Incorruptible Scorecard: A detailed evaluation of a real company using Eric Ries's Incorruptible framework, analyzing financial pressures, governance structures, and mission alignment.
• Action Plan: A strategic plan of action for your chosen company to become more Incorruptible, with concrete recommendations.
• Final Capstone: A polished presentation that demonstrates your analytical skills and allows you to make your case powerfully to Eric Ries himself.

Eric Ries is the creator of the Lean Startup method and author of the New York Times bestseller The Lean Startup and Incorruptible. Over two decades, his ideas about continuous innovation, long-term thinking, governance, and market reform have reshaped company building and management practices worldwide.

Present and communicate your investment thesis to an investment committee.

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1. Financial Statements Analysis: Analyze SEC filings and company financial reports to determine financial health and identify key risks.
2. Macroeconomic & Industry Trends: Investigate macroeconomic conditions and industry-specific trends influencing stock market performance.
3. Risk & Catalyst Identification: Identify potential risks and market catalysts that could impact company valuations and stock performance.
4. Trading Activity & Analyst Ratings: Review insider transactions and analyst ratings to gauge investor confidence and market sentiment around the company.
5. Financial Model Development: Construct robust valuation models to forecast financial performance and price targets.
6. Investment Memo & Presentation: Prepare professional, detailed investment memos and present recommendations clearly to stakeholders.