The smiling young woman in the video mouths the words to the song playing in the background. “I’m Mr. White Christmas; I’m Mr. Snow.” As she lip syncs, she carefully dabs white face paint onto half of her face. She tops it with accents of glittery blue and the delicate arms of snowflakes.
Seconds later, the lyrics shift: “I’m Mr. Green Christmas; I’m Mr. Sun.” The young woman begins making up the other side of her face, this time painting on oranges and reds and swooping representations of fire.
The YouTuber on the screen is Columbus native Marian Turner, and the two halves of her face might well represent the wide variety of interests she holds.
“I don’t know exactly what I want to do long term,” she said. “Right now, I’m trying to figure out my interests and build up my experiences.”
This week and for the next nine weeks, Turner is adding to her collection of experiences. The 2019 Columbus High School valedictorian will spend the summer in New York City as a marketing intern with the brand Cartier.
Her internship is part of a partnership between RAISEfashion and the Anti Racism Fund. The partnership offers experiences in the fashion industry to students who identify as Black and attend one of four historically Black colleges and universities — Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, Howard University, Morehouse College, and Spelman College.
Turner has just finished her second year at Spelman College, a fact she is proud to share.
“Spelman does a great job of providing opportunities for students and putting us first. That’s why we are the No. 1 HBCU. We’ve been No. 1 for 13 years,” she said.
Going to Spelman has been a dream of hers since high school.
“Spelman has been my dream school since I learned about it in the ninth grade. It’s an all-women’s college,” she said.
“But there is an all-men’s college across the street,” she added with a laugh.
A passion for fashion
Turner is majoring in international studies and minoring in film, but she doesn’t yet know exactly how she wants to use that education. That’s part of the reason she was so interested in the internship program when she heard about it.
“My school sends us probably 50 emails a day,” she joked. “And I happened to read this one.”
“This one” was the email that introduced Turner to the internship she now holds.
“It was open to all majors,” she said. “They asked us about our interests and then contacted people.”
After her application was accepted, Turner went through a series of interviews.
“They matched each applicant with three companies, and we each interviewed with all three,” she said. “Then we ranked the companies in order from one to three. The companies ranked us from one to three as well, and that’s how we were matched.”
As it turns out, both Turner and Cartier got their No. 1 picks.
“I put Cartier as my first choice,” she said. “And when I got here, my supervisor told me they put me as their first choice as well.”
Turner is one of many interns at Cartier this summer, but she is one of only two who are still students.
“All the other interns are college grads,” she said. “There is one other college student here (interning at Cartier), and that person goes to Howard University.”
While at Cartier, Turner will conduct market research and make marketing suggestions to her team.
“My role is to give them ideas to get the attention of the next generation. I’m also doing competitive analysis of other brands, to see what they have and bring it back here,” she said.
Turner is working with the accessories team, a group that focuses on products including purses, keychains, belts, and sunglasses.
“All the interns will give presentations at the end of the summer,” she said. “One will be about what we did all summer, so I’ll show what I did for my department. The other will be just for my team, to suggest ideas to them based on my research.”
A passion for people
The internship gives Turner a chance to bring together her great passions: fashion and people. She is a Bonner Scholar at Spelman and completes at least 140 hours of community service per semester as part of that program.
Her first year at Spelman, she partnered with a middle school in Atlanta.
In 2020, she became a leader in the Student Success Program. But of course last year was a year like no other.
“I worked with 15 first-year students,” Turner said. “But their entire year was virtual. We have so many traditions at our school that are normally done in person that they were missing out on,” she said. “So I did different presentations on how to join organizations and how to get good grades … things that they actually wanted to know.”
Her dedication to the students paid off, according to Brandi Reese, coordinator of academic outreach and success.
“Marian’s student attendance was consistently at the top or near the top of all of our 40 groups,” she said. “The program is not required, so the fact that her students were attending, not just fall semester but spring semester, too … it says a lot about her.”
Turner’s students also shared a class together, one all first-year Spelman students take called African Diaspora. In addition to helping her students acclimate to college life in general, Turner’s goal was to help them with that and other first-year classes.
“Marian went above and beyond to keep them engaged,” Reese said. “She had an end-of-year wrap-up with her mentees, and she created an awards ceremony for them that was incredibly creative and catered to her kids.”
At the ceremony, Turner gave her students awards she created herself. She named one student “Most Likely to Become Oprah” and gave another the “Stacey Abrams Award,” Reese remembered.
“Marian is just one of those students,” Reese said. “If she needs anything, if she needs a letter of recommendation or anything at all… I’m on it.”
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