ABOUT @INTERNSHIPGIRL

Avalon Fenster is the Founder of @internshipgirl, a platform dedicated to lifting the social and economic status of her community of 300,000+ young women globally through early career education using technology and media. Officially launched in early 2022, @internshipgirl has reached an audience of tens of millions from 100+ countries, of which 90% are women on average. Many are from some of the regions where women’s mobility can be the hardest to achieve. The platform is currently followed by 150k+ on Instagram and 150k+ on TikTok.

 

In her freshman year of college, Avalon served as a Policy and Community Outreach Fellow with nonprofit Pay Our Interns, where she personally contributed to the campaign that got the White House to pay its interns for the first time in history. As a first-generation American woman, she was particularly concerned for how labor equity issues impacted women. After doing her research, she grew discontent with what she saw: while women’s access to education might be improving, a new struggle arises as millions of educated women lack the post-educational support they need to continue on their professional path. She wondered why world leaders were not speaking out on gaps in young women’s early career development across the globe. Committed to being part of the solution, she launched @internshipgirl soon after her time at the organization concluded.

 

Since launching, she has grown to become much beloved by young women everywhere for her easy-to-digest templates and tips for resumes, cover letters, interviews, and networking which have garnered 1 million+ saves across platforms. Uniquely, she uses her own accounts as a public resource—often asking her community to support each other using her page. For example, her coveted LinkedIn connection content has connected over 10,000 young women to each other on LinkedIn through her comment section, and her peer-to-peer advice “columns” have reached over 3 million young women. She has spoken about her work at Harvard University, Columbia University (her alma mater), on the Broadway stage in partnership with Suffs The Musical, and at other colleges and high schools across the country. In addition, she has been featured in Business Insider, TeenVogue, Her Campus, and on @feminist, and she was an honoree of the 2024 Her Campus and E.L.F. Cosmetics 22 Under 22 Awards. 

 

Outside of her content creation and speaking engagements, she advocates in both the public and private sectors for early career development for women. Just in this past year, she has been invited to sit at numerous tables with former heads of state, UN leaders, and C-Suite executives to push for the prioritization of early career development in both the global humanitarian and corporate spaces. This spring, she leveraged her knowledge to contribute to research on applications of AI and other technology to economically empower women in the global south at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. As an incoming 1L at Cornell Law School, she intends to continue expanding her advocacy through exploration into public policy and legal methods of empowerment for women in emerging economies as the digital transformation unfolds.

 

In her mission to make early career education accessible to all, Avalon has also collaborated with multi-billion dollar companies such as Handshake and Notion to deliver free resources to the students who follow her—including virtual educational career development workshops and digitally accessible professional tools that break down geographic barriers to success. In addition to her social media audience, she has also developed communities in the thousands on Discord and Geneva, where direct peer-to-peer support can be found for her community. 

 

Many of the young women who are part of the @internshipgirl community experience substantial obstacles to early career development—including financial, geographic, educational, cultural, and social obstacles. When a sample of 1,200 of these young women were polled, 80% responded that they do not feel prepared to enter the workforce after finishing their studies. As such, her proudest moments are when she receives messages from young women who have shared how her work has changed the trajectory of their lives—whether that’s tangibly helping them become the first in their family to attend college through directing them to preparatory programs, sharing insights that win them paid work which makes them upwardly economically mobile, or simply being the first person to encourage their ambitions.