Internship Leads to Job Offer for Daniels Senior

Berkeley Rebman leaned on the DU network to jumpstart her career

Months before she holds her diploma, Berkeley Rebman has a job offer in her hand. After walking off the Commencement stage at Magness Arena in June, she’ll step straight into a commercial associate role at Wayfair in Boston.

It’s a fitting reward for her hard work as an intern this summer, a position she landed with help from the career services team at the Daniels College of Business and the strong alumni network.

“The job search is not the most fun, so being able to utilize people who can help is nice,” said Rebman, who is studying business information and analytics.

Rebman began looking for an internship as a junior, while studying abroad in Paris. She found the Wayfair listing while scanning Pioneer Careers Online (PCO), which offers University of Denver students a wide array of career tools, such as curated jobs, special events, programs, workshops and recruiter contact information. She saw reminders in the weekly Daniels student newsletters too.

Once she applied and Wayfair told her it liked her resume, she began connecting with the College’s network of more than 40,000 alumni—which led her to former Wayfair employee Maggie Danforth (BSBA 2018) and DU alumna Sarah Tredennick (BA 2011), a senior manager of product merchandising.

“Berkeley reached out over LinkedIn,” said Tredennick, who graduated with degrees in criminology and political science. “She was interested in connecting about the company and role. Having a common interest or past shared experience such as education is an easy lead in for a networking conversation, and I would encourage anyone to leverage this for informational interviews.”

Tredennick noticed Rebman’s strong background and offered to work internally to highlight her application.

Wayfair: Just what she needed

At Wayfair, Rebman worked as a commercial strategy associate intern in the lighting department at Perigold, the company’s luxury line. Over the course of 10 weeks, she researched potential suppliers, audited the company’s catalog for inconsistencies and flagged products in the “Why We Love It” section that, maybe, weren’t as loveable.

“Ultimately it was a really good way to learn how you can utilize analytics,” she said. “One thing I really appreciated is that my manager gave me a lot of autonomy in my work. One of the nine people principles at Wayfair is to be an owner. Just because you’re 21 years old doesn’t mean that you’re not capable of taking some of this stuff.”

Wayfair also encouraged her to set up meetings with people in different departments who could be of help on certain projects.

That included Tredennick, whose role didn’t overlap. Still, she served as an effective sounding board and mentor. The relationship cemented a friendship that will no doubt pay dividends as Rebman joins the company.

“While I did not manage Berkeley or work with her directly, through her mentions of what she was working on, I could imagine her keen eye for detail, organization and strong communication skills certainly supported her success,” Tredennick said. “She is equally as unafraid to respectfully voice her opinion, try new things and support others, all traits that make strong performers successful.”