New York City is a long way from home for Holly intern Maren Strand.

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Born and raised in Bozeman, Montana, Maren is an MBA candidate at Yale School of Management and was this summer’s Product Enablement Strategy Intern at Holly. So new experiences are Maren’s bread and butter.

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For undergrad, Maren packed up and moved across the country to Williams College, where she studied Political Science and Arabic Studies. The summer before her senior year, she interned for the Middle East Institute in D.C., an experience that sparked her interest in surveillance capitalism, which became the subject of her senior capstone project.

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Since her graduation in 2020, Strand has committed herself to public service and government from multiple angles. Right after college, she spent the summer and fall working as a Field Organizer for the Montana Democratic Party, before transitioning into a client success role at Indigov, a GovTech start-up built for constituent relations. Before Yale, Maren spent two years at Chemonics in business operations.

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Just seeing one side of how a business works wasn’t enough for Strand, however, which is why she applied to Yale School of Management. There, she hopes to gain a 360-degree view of how businesses operate, zooming out from the positions she’s already held.

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Here, Maren has truly shaped how the platform can be used by customers by building out Holly’s learning academy from end-to-end. This project is more than just a help center; it’ll chart the future of how Holly can be used by customers and how Holly’s impact can scale across the nation.

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Maren doesn’t steer away from risks or challenges. Given ten weeks, she bit at the chance to define Holly’s onboarding for years to come and went above and beyond our wildest expectations of what product enablement and product comms can look like. (Her favorite Slack reaction is, aptly, the heavy plus-sign… a great reminder that if you ask Maren if she can do something, the answer is almost always ‘yes’).

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And we’d be remiss to ignore what a star she’s been in the office. From gracefully leading important meetings just weeks into her internship to hosting an office-wide pizza party that got the whole team involved in transitioning to a new support software, every day Maren was on the Holly team was one we couldn’t take for granted.

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We’re sad to say goodbye, but we’re just as excited to see what she’s able to achieve. Thanks for spending your summer with us, Maren. Wherever you end up, you’ll always be a Holly!