Building Courageous Careers: Meet Makena Yee, Design Intern, InHerShoes
July 30, 2021
Makena Yee
Makena is a social butterfly who loves influencing others to be their most authentic selves on and off social media. As a full time student at UW Seattle, Makena still makes time for her passions: food blogging, content creating, and social media marketing. Besides her passions, Makena enjoys beauty blogging and art making! It’s important to Makena that she uses her expertise in social media management and content creation to uplift women-owned businesses in the greater Seattle area.
When Makena isn’t at school or doing work, she loves trying new restaurants with her best friends and going on small adventures! From hiking with her dog, to creating new art collages, Makena keeps busy by doing the things she loves.
Although Makena is a full time college student, she hopes to be successful in the Public Relations and social media field after graduate school.
IG: @seattle.grub
LI: Makena Yee
TikTok: @makena.yee
What brought you to InHerShoes?
InHerShoes was a perfect opportunity to network with like minded women and collaborate amongst others to catalyze courage within ourselves. Now two years later since attending my first InHerShoes event, I have made so many meaningful connections and cultivated newfound discoveries within myself. I learned that being 1% more courageous has led me to who I am today and I continue to strive to be 1% more.
What are you working on now at IHS? How does this work fuel your passion?
At InHerShoes, I serve as the Design Intern where I collaborate with the marketing team to design, create, and schedule evergreen content. I contribute to the content creation and ideate new design concepts. For the past few years, my passion has been social media. Whether it be social media platforms to creating content itself, social media is my calling. This internship has taught me how organizations like InHerShoes plan, curate, and operate their social media. I have been able to not only incorporate my own knowledge on social media, but I have extended my knowledge of my passion through this position.
What is your greatest learning experience (thus far)?
My greatest learning experience is taking a step back and being mindful whether or not the content we are producing contains relevant information. At InHerShoes, we strive to create content that speaks to our targeted audiences while being inclusive, relevant, and diverse to create relevancy, but not “noise”.
What do you appreciate most about your summer experience?
Through this summer internship, I have been loving the supportive team of courageous women that help me be 1% more courageous. Collaborating and creating evergreen content with Camille has been an awesome learning experience as well.
What’s next for your future?
Since I am going to be an upcoming senior in college, I am beyond excited to carry the knowledge and experience that I have learned from this internship to apply for graduate school or to utilize in my future career (in social media or marketing hopefully). I am excited to continue being 1% more courageous with whatever my future holds.
This summer, Makena volunteered 10-12 hours a week to InHerShoes and worked closely with Head of Content Development, Camille De La Rosa.
Her responsibilities included brainstorming weekly social prompts, developing the concepts and creatives for Monday Motivations, and experimenting with new creative designs on Canva (Makena hadn’t used Canva for social media promotion since her days of being High School Class President, so it was a playful time of rediscovery and experimentation).
Her favorite project from this summer was profiling Elyse Uyema, founder of @livelongandplant, as a Catalyst Highlight of the week.
Makena also found a new mentor and friendship with Camille. From Camille, Makena learned more about the art of making thoughtful, intentional and inclusive social media posts. Makena will always remember Camille saying,
“We don’t want to make noise, we want to sail the seas.”
On the flipside, Camille [re-]learned the joy of collaboration from Makena.
"I'm inspired by the bright energy and unique perspectives Makena brings to the table. She is a multifaceted, multi-passionate catalyst who has carved a lane for herself in every avenue of her interests, refusing to let society box her in.
She's also a testament to the fact that the mentors each of us will encounter throughout our lives can be our age or younger. I've already learned so much from her during our time working together, and I'm excited to see what her '1% more courageous moments' will look like beyond her summer internship."
