We’re thrilled to announce that NIU Esports has expanded our partnership with leading gaming accessories maker Turtle Beach to include an NIU internship with the company. Ethan Nguyen is a senior majoring in computer science and is also a student worker for NIU Esports, who helps manage our equipment and runs and organizes the Twitch.tv live broadcasts of our varsity matches. Ethan also happens to be the first NIU Turtle Beach intern.
Since early June, Ethan has been working with Turtle Beach on their outreach to online content creators. With the guidance of his Turtle Beach mentors, Ethan reaches out to content creators who might be a good fit for Turtle Beach’s affiliate marketing partnerships program. Ethan is a computer scientist with an interest in app development and enterprise software engineering, so he’s excited to see the business side of a company whose products support both casual and competitive esports players. He’s also grateful for the chance to build communication, troubleshooting and organization skills that will help in his future career.
We sat down with Ethan to learn more about his internship experience, how he got involved with NIU Esports, and his advice to other students.
Can you start out by telling us a little bit about yourself and what you’re involved with at NIU?
I’m currently a senior at NIU studying computer science with a minor in business administration. Outside of academics, I’m involved in NIU’s Esports program as a student worker. I help out with the front desk at the NIU Esports Arena and help to troubleshoot any problems with the PCs. I’m also the broadcast leader responsible for making sure our esports varsity matches get broadcast live and maintained on the Twitch platform.
How did you get involved with NIU Esports?
My connection with NIU Esports started before I even came to NIU! My freshman year I studied at my local community college, College of DuPage, and I was really involved in the computer science department there as well as the student computer science club. Someone from NIU was there advertising the Huskie Hack, which was a hackathon competition at NIU open to students from any university or college. I decided to attend. We were given a problem and then split into teams. The goal was to implement a solution using the skills we’ve learned through computer science and marketing. (That year the challenge was to implement a way to reduce food waste and advertise that product to a group of judges.)
After the Huskie Hack we heard that the previous semester NIU had opened up an Esports Arena in Altgeld Hall, so my hackathon team decided to check it out. That was my first introduction to NIU and to NIU Esports. I got into NIU’s culture, which led me to eventually transfer to NIU.
What did you like about NIU’s culture?
At the time, there weren’t many esports programs in Illinois colleges, so that visit to NIU sparked my interest to run my own esports program over at my community college, College of DuPage. I got a lot of inspiration from NIU and tried to implement how they operated the esports program and apply it to the community college level.
What are some of your favorite games?
I currently play Valorant and League of Legends, which are two of the games we offer at NIU for our varsity teams. I’m not on the varsity team – I’m just playing for fun much more casually. I do follow our varsity teams because I work on broadcasting their games, and also because I’m a super fan of NIU Esports! I’m definitely rooting for our teams with that competitive Huskie spirit!
What have you been doing for your Turtle Beach internship?
I’m with the marketing partnership side of the company. That means I do outreach to content creators, essentially online personalities that represent the gaming industry through entertainment and content. My day-to-day task is to work with my mentors at Turtle Beach, and if there’s a content creator or internet personality that I think would be a good fit for our affiliate partnerships program, I reach out to them and schedule an interview. If the interview goes well and we think they’re a good fit, we invite them into the affiliate program. In that program, essentially, they become representatives of Turtle Beach in some way, integrating Turtle Beach gaming accessories into the videos and material that they’re already posting. In that way, the goal is for Turtle Beach products to reach a wider audience.
I’m also the Turtle Beach Student Ambassador for NIU. My role in this is to maintain communication between NIU Esports and Turtle Beach, while also planning out collaborative events we could do for our campus esports arena.
It’s really interesting that you’re a computer science major, but your internship is on the marketing side of the company. Can you say a bit more about what you’re learning from that crossover?
Even though this internship is related to marketing, I can definitely see a lot of it going hand-in-hand with my computer science major and business administration minor. Computer science and business go together in general because you have to have the business side not only for marketing, but also project management, which is a really important skill for computer science. Keeping things organized, keeping tasks streamlined and making the onboarding process more efficient are all tasks where computer science and business skills come together.
Interesting! And since you’re doing the Twitch streaming for the NIU varsity teams, you have experience with that public-facing, marketing-related role for NIU Esports as well.
For sure!
Can you share a few more details about when your internship started, where you work, etc.?
I started my internship in early June. It’s a six-month internship, so I’ll be working with them until the end of the fall semester. They have offices in San Diego, New York and some international cities, as well. So far, I’ve stayed here in Illinois working remotely – and of course the content creators we reach out to are all across the world.
Can you tell us a little more about your career goals and plans after graduation?
After graduation, I definitely want to focus more on the connections between computer science and business. At NIU I’m not only learning computer science at the enterprise level; I’m also learning about the esports industry and the business structure behind it.
I’m so glad I got into NIU Esports because, not only did I get to have fun with people who share my interest in casual and competitive gaming, but I also learned some super valuable skills that I still use every day in my current jobs. Whether it’s how to de-escalate challenging situations, find solutions to problems, time management, planning or how to work as a team – those are all things I’ve absorbed and practiced during my time involved with college esports at both College of DuPage and NIU.
What have you learned from your internship so far that you feel might apply in future careers or in life?
So far in my internship, I’ve definitely learned a lot about how people communicate together as a team, how organizational skills plays a major role in our day-to-day tasks and how to manage any conflict that comes our way. It’s really important to stay on top of your communication skills because, not only are you going to be talking to your co-workers, but you might also have to communicate with other departments and organizations, and you might not be familiar with how they approach things. So those are the big takeaways for me so far – the importance of communication and of being organized.
Why would you recommend internships in general, or the Turtle Beach internship in particular, to other students?
The skills you learn in this internship are so valuable, especially if you think you might want to work in any sort of marketing position or software development related to marketing or social media applications.
In addition to learning the transferrable skills of teamwork, communication and organization, I’m also learning to use and integrate a lot of current technology. In my current internship, I use many current social media platforms: YouTube, TikTok, X and others. The industry is really shifting towards that short-form content, so it’s very cool to see how Turtle Beach uses that as a brand, and how creators use those platforms. There’s a lot of experimentation and staying up to date with current trends and technologies the industry uses.
I am fascinated by how central social media has been to your career and internship experience so far, from finding out about the job to performing it.
I would say that’s because with social media and online, it pretty much closes that distance boundary. You can connect to people anywhere. You don’t have to only know the people that you met through local community fairs or job fairs and such. That online networking is a key part of career exploration and development these days. If you take advantage of those tools, you can gain a lot of knowledge and opportunities online.
You’ve spoken about using LinkedIn for your own networking. You’ve got experience on Twitch working with NIU Esports. Then you’ve explored TikTok and other platforms in your internship. I’m curious – how do these online platforms relate to your major in computer science?
That’s a good question because computer science is a really broad major. It can branch to a lot of things, from cybersecurity to information science to artificial intelligence. I’m most interested in coding, programming and app development. So, for example, what I do for
NIU esports is to program some tools for future students to use who work on broadcasting after I graduate. Some of those tools help with the scoreboard so the viewers can see what the score is, some make the broadcast more interactive, stuff like that. I’d like to continue that type of work after I graduate by getting a job in the software engineering side of the field. Having had experience as the end user of many different applications definitely helps you better understand how to engineer effective apps.
To end our conversation, what would be your advice to other students about internships, college and esports?
That’s a good question, so I’ll break it down. First, with internships, I would say the most important advice is to grow your network. Nowadays the job market can get pretty tough, but if you really put yourself out there – attend our NIU job fairs, connect with other students within the network, use recruiting platforms or networking platforms like
LinkedIn and potentially social media – that would get you ahead in terms of getting those internship and job opportunities. In fact, I heard about the Turtle Beach internship on LinkedIn, so that helped to make this opportunity possible for me.
In terms of esports, I would definitely say that’s one of the things that’s very special about NIU. Not many Illinois universities currently offer an esports program that’s so active, with so many ways to get involved at every level. Even if you don’t feel like you’re competitive enough or have enough skill to compete on one of our teams, it’s still worth getting involved to play more casually. This ties back to expanding your network, getting to know more people at NIU and, overall, having that sense of community as a Huskie. I think it’s very important to focus on your academics, but it’s just as important to get involved in extracurriculars and find your community.
