GRIIS works very closely with students to help them achieve their academic, personal, and professional goals. As a junior at Simmons College in Boston, I am double majoring in both PR/Marketing Communications and Spanish. GRIIS helped me find an internship at a consulting company called Atika Karam that integrates both of my interests.
Atika Karam is a relatively young company that works closely with other companies and organizations in the health sector of primarily Spain and Morocco that want to internationalize their services and products. By serving as strategists and multilingual communicators, the team at Atika Karam crafts and executes specialized plans for these organizations. Their most recent project focuses on increasing Moroccan citizens’ access to healthcare by way of a multifaceted strategy that connects hospitals in regions such as Rabat, Tanger, and Oujda in Morocco with the Technology Park of Health Sciences in Granada, as geographically and culturally, these areas are very much linked.
At my internship with Atika Karam, I am working on creating a marketing plan on how I would best sell Argan oil, a Moroccan product, in the United States. Argan oil can only be found in southwest Morocco due to the extremely dry and hot climate the trees are accustomed to. According to various studies, Argan oil can be used to treat not only dermatological disorders such as eczema and acne but also help prevent cardiovascular disease, which is the number one cause of death for women in the US, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In my project, I am aiming to fuse the concepts of conscious consumption and social responsibility into a marketing plan that would both inform the public and persuade them to invest in their own wellbeing and that of the Moroccan people.
by Ellen Garnett (Simmons College)
