Student moonlights as Cisco blogger

Just call her the Cisco kid — with a keyboard. Tulane senior Kati Dahm spent the past summer interning in Palo Alto, Calif., her hometown, for Cisco Systems, a leading manufacturer of networking equipment. Her role: blogger.

Dahm did such a good job that Cisco has hired her to stay on as a student blogger now that she's returned to New Orleans.

“My dad has worked at Cisco for several years, so he knew that Cisco hires an average of 600 interns a summer. He encouraged me to apply,” says Dahm, who is majoring in political science with a minor in business. “The majority of interns are engineers, but I was one of the handful of social media interns hired by corporate communications.”

At Cisco, Dahm contributes content to the corporate newsroom and analyzes how other companies similar to Cisco use social media. She puts in around seven hours a week into her blog, called “Adventures as an Intern.”

“We curate a lot of content, not just produce it. A lot of our visitors are people who know about Cisco and want to know about other things, and people who work within Cisco,” explains Dahm.

Cisco is known among industry peers for having one of the leading social networking intranets — important for a company that has more than 71,000 employees.

Dahm credits a class she took in the business school for preparing her for the internship.

“I'd taken a social media class taught by Ashley Nelson right before I interviewed, so the timing was perfect,” said Dahm. “Her class provided a good overview of everything social media–related, all the tools. Branding ourselves using social media translates into how to use it for business.”

Now that she's back in New Orleans, Dahm's charge is to explore the link between education and technology. Currently, Dahm is working on a blog post about how Tulane University is using social media.