June 23, 2020
Moore School international business and marketing junior Vincent Buccini had plans to intern with UPS Singapore during summer 2020 until the coronavirus pandemic caused his program to be canceled.
Unwilling to let the pandemic stop him from gaining real world marketing experience, Buccini coordinated with UPS and is now working stateside with the shipping company’s international marketing team. UPS is headquartered in Atlanta, but Buccini will complete his internship work remotely.
Originally planning to spend two and a half months in Singapore, Buccini hoped to gain experience in providing support for digital advertising channels and aspects of creative review. Buccini said he was also excited about the role he would play in facilitating communications between customers from different cultures.
Although it will be different than his initial plan, Buccini said this new internship layout will still provide him with ample learning opportunities. He will be working on marketing and advertising directed at international markets. His main project includes combining and simplifying a broad set of international marketing data so managers across the world can access it more easily, he said. This new experience will also offer Buccini other professional learning opportunities.
“Working stateside will definitely provide me my biggest learning opportunity of figuring out how to work what is essentially a nine-to-five job from home,” Buccini said. “I expect to alternate between my family home in Dallas, Texas, and apartment in Columbia, South Carolina, throughout the summer, but I’m looking for as much opportunity as possible to complete the requirements of my internship from a location that’s more interesting than the desk in my room.”
While many students and professionals are continuing to navigate the reality of working from home, Buccini said he hopes to gain an understanding of what it’s like to work remotely in the “real world.”
“I’m excited to see what tools I’ll be able to learn and use while working remotely,” he added.
Buccini was saddened to hear that he would not be working and living in Singapore this summer, but fortunately this internship with UPS was not Buccini’s only chance to live and study abroad while attending the Moore School. A member of the school’s International Business of the Americas (Chile) cohort, Buccini will spend a year studying abroad at the University of Chile beginning in January 2021.
Buccini hopes to broaden his international repertoire and business skills through his internship with UPS in anticipation of his studies in Chile; additionally, Buccini has already seen some entrepreneurial success while at USC. Buccini is currently president of Caerus, LLC, which he initially started as an online T-shirt company while in high school that now encompasses clothing, digital design and LineUp, a line-skipping app that allows USC students to save time getting into popular venues in Columbia’s Five Points district.
“Recently, I’ve closed my LineSkip LLC registration and created Caerus, LLC instead,” Buccini said. “Formalizing Caerus’s managerial and marketing-related operations has been a fantastic experience, and Caerus hosted its first sustainable popup shop at ColaKicks in February, where I donated a portion of my clothing sales to USC’s Ecoreps. I’m using Caerus to encompass everything, including clothing, LineUp/future apps, other digital products, including logos, ads, social media content, videos, websites. This summer I’ve started taking account of revenue and expenses related to these activities on a monthly basis, which comes after learning from initially running LineSkip LLC.”
Buccini also completed a research project where he created a matrix detailing the effect specific activities have on social media engagement for entrepreneurship centers. This research has helped Buccini drive a more consistent digital presence for Caerus.
“With running Caerus, I’ve been able to hone my leadership, marketing and design skills, and I’m especially excited to begin applying my higher level education to gathering marketing research and creating more financially accurate business plans,” Buccini said. “IBUS 310 has greatly expanded my worldview, and every time I step out of the class or any other, I immediately think of how I can apply my learning towards my business.”
Hoping to one day combine his knowledge from the Moore School with his experiences from living abroad, Buccini plans to eventually mold Caerus into a sustainability-focused architecture firm.
“I’ve known for my whole life that I want to design things; now I can securely say that I’d like to do this as a man of business, ideally as an entrepreneur, and that I aspire to be working somewhere that allows me to branch out and start my own practice with the reliance of some financial support,” Buccini said. “I could see myself buying land in Latin America, so that I could build a campus for my company, and step by step, begin creating a more visually pleasing, environmentally conscious and globally minded world.”
-Erin Mooney