Before We Get Started……

I just want to provide you all with a quick background of myself (my mother taught me good introductions go a long way!) My name is Linos Owusu-Asare, my family originates from Ghana (in a city you may have not heard of called Kumasi) but I lived in England (in another city you may have not heard of called London J ) my entire pre-adult life, before coming to Philadelphia to study at Penn (go Quakers!) for my undergrad degree. I would say that I am a pretty diverse person (how many people do you know can realistically fit three continents into their introductory sentence?!) and I have been given the great opportunity this summer to intern at Udemy. Their mission for the future of online education, the passion they have for their work, and the great community they have with each other are just three of the reasons why I am privileged to be working with Udemy and their staff to help change the online education space, one user at a time! If you want to get in further contact with me, feel free to e-mail me linos@udemy.com, or find me on Facebook/Skype/all over the internet

Day 1 – Home @ the Ud House (5/10)

First official day on the job.  (Side note: Came in yesterday even though I was due to start tomorrow, just because I was so excited to meet the team. Further side note: After meeting the team that excitement was definitely warranted!). Started with a stand up meeting with the whole content team (division which I will be interning with this summer) discussing what we did yesterday and what we are going to accomplish today. It’s a nice way of keeping everyone in the loop and everyone accountable (in addition to a nice workout since everyone has to hold something heavy while discussing, in order to promote efficient discussion – this definitely works!)

After this I had a meeting with Tim and Arch, which just explained the goals for Udemy and what my role will be in helping them achieve these. This definitely helped integrate me into the mindset behind the staff and really got me excited to work (P.S: Tim and Arch are the real life Yoda and Obi Wan – trust me after speaking to them you feel that you have the force to do anything!)

Next up was a meeting with Max (push-up extraordinaire!), who really set me off on my first two tasks – to research potential instructors for exciting new verticals and to generate different styles of outreach to attract these instructors. Max gave me all the help I needed, in addition to the flexibility I needed to go about this in my own way, so I was set and jumped straight to it!

Upon working on my tasks, various other exciting things went on in the office (I’ve been told that they always do, so I ain’t complaining) including a) A lunch trip with the content team. Tried a nice new organic place in the financial district. Good food and good company – learnt that I am alongside a fellow Penn man (@Dinesh – always stay Quaking!), a fellow world traveller (shoutout @Audrey, who has the best smile in town) and a fellow PC user (@Alex – we have to stay strong in our fight the Mac resistance!). All of this makes me feel right at home. b) Push-up time trials. Udemy is taking part in a push-up contest with other start-ups for various charities (smartly called PushUp Charity – check it out) and we want to win for Muttville! I managed to crank out twenty push-ups in 15 seconds, but Max is going to be leading us troops with twenty in 12 seconds (told you he was an extraordinaire!). c) Much much more, but I got to save it so you keep on coming back to read my beautiful work!