Summer Intern, FGS Global
FGS Global is one of the world’s leading strategic communications firms, advising Fortune 500 companies and global leaders through the moments that define their reputation — IPOs, crises, and the long work of building trust. I spent the summer of 2026 as one of two students selected office-wide for a Summer Internship in the San Francisco office, working across IPO and financial communications, corporate positioning, and executive reputation for clients and leaders at the center of technology, media, and business.
Most of my work lived upstream of the story: media monitoring, reporter research, and coverage analysis that shaped what our teams recommended to clients. I assessed inbound media inquiries and newsjacking opportunities against reputational risk and message alignment, then drafted recommendations for client consideration — learning quickly that the decision not to comment is as strategic as the decision to do so.
The project I’m proudest of started as a time problem. Our team depended on a daily AI news report produced by FGS’s Media Intelligence team, but our client’s budget didn’t buy a place at the front of that queue — some days we waited hours for it, sometimes the better part of a day. So we spent a meaningful chunk of each morning assembling a client-relevant news scan by hand, which meant the highest-leverage window for newsjacking — the first few hours of a news cycle — went to gathering news rather than analyzing it and drafting recommendations.
I built an automated workflow using Claude and Make.com that curated and delivered a daily AI brief straight to our inboxes: monitoring the beats, publications, and competitors that mattered to the client, filtering for genuine relevance rather than keyword buzz, and packaging it so the team could open one email and immediately see what was worth acting on. It put us ahead of the cycle, surfacing newsjacking opportunities early enough to actually pitch them. I also trained teammates on FGS’s internal AI platform — including how to save skills and set up the right context — so the workflow outlived my internship.
Case Study: Winning FGS Global’s Intern Pitch Competition
The Challenge:
Every FGS intern class competes in an internal pitch competition, and our cohort drew one of the hardest assignments in sports communications: the labor negotiations between Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association. Collective bargaining fights are, structurally, a communications trap. They get covered as a fight between millionaires and billionaires, both sides get framed as greedy, and the fans — the people whose money and attention the entire enterprise runs on — become spectators to an argument about them rather than participants in it. Every previous work stoppage in baseball has cost the sport goodwill it took years to recover.
Our task was to build a communications strategy that didn’t just defend a position, but changed the subject of the conversation.
My Approach:
I owned the strategic architecture of our pitch — the framework, the messenger strategy, and the creative campaign that carried it. Everything ran under one campaign line, “Level the Field,” chosen on evidence rather than instinct: in message testing, it beat the alternative on every measure, with 77% preferring it and 85% saying it signaled that owners and fans wanted the same thing. Beneath it sat four pillars built to move the story off “millionaires vs. billionaires” and onto shared stakes:
Fan Advocacy
Hand the microphone to fans, not executives. Their traditions and disappointments carry the argument about competitive balance further than any statement from the league office.
Shared Success
Frame the agreement as something that lifts every market rather than a zero-sum split of a fixed pot. The NFL and NBA have already proved the model works — baseball is next.
Economic Transparency
Put the economics in public first. Collapsing regional sports networks and a fivefold payroll gap make the case for reform before anyone can accuse ownership of hiding the math.
Spokesperson Strategy
Trusted outside voices carry the message past the negotiating table — a Hall of Fame closer, a championship manager, a sports economist, and an NBA champion who took less to win.
Reach and Inclusion
Spanish-language media and Latino fan communities are underserved by league messaging. Dedicated outreach in Miami, New York, and Los Angeles closes a real gap in earned coverage.
The Video Campaign
Real fans on camera in the markets that feel the gap: three generations waiting on a Marlins pennant, fifteen years of Rays watch parties, a Knicks title won by sacrifice.
The Impact:
Our team won FGS Global’s Intern Pitch Competition. In their feedback, the judges specifically named the elements I had built — the pillar framework, the spokesperson strategy, and the fan-led video campaign — as the reasons our pitch stood out from the field.
We also defined what winning would look like after the pitch, which is the part I’d argue matters most. The plan set five measurable dimensions with targets attached: 60% or better favorable coverage within sixty days, 500,000 petition signatures by December 1, parity or better in share of voice against the players’ association, every counter-message out in under two hours, and 100% of priority Congressional offices briefed with zero sponsor defections.
More than the result, the assignment taught me something I’ve carried into everything since: the most effective reframe in a high-stakes negotiation is usually not a better argument, but a better protagonist.
View the full presentation deck below.