Turning innovative ideas into impact
Breanna Levy’s journey from communications to discovering a passion for product management and how she made an impact at TD Insurance.
Breanna Levy (she/her), a fourth-year Global Business and Digital Arts (GBDA) student, shares her impactful projects and personal growth through her two co-op terms with TD Insurance. Her co-op journey has taught her more about herself, the workplace and her career direction for the future.
Breanna's co-op journey
Work term one: Breanna’s co-op journey began at TD Insurance (TDI) as a communications and content training specialist. She made a game-based training program for employees, created trackers for executives and redesigned and organized their internal training websites.
Work term two: For her second work term, Breanna returned to TDI as a communications intern. She owned a learning and development program called TDI Learning Launchpad from end to end. She also created a program called Espresso Chats for connecting interns to executives and strategized the campaign for the program.
Q&A with Breanna
What did you enjoy about TD’s company culture?
“I really liked how everyone was there to help. I felt like anytime I needed to raise my hand and ask a question, there was always someone willing to help me out. The office had a very open concept layout, so it was a very collaborative environment.”
“They really emphasize coffee chat culture at TD. You can email any employee and connect with them even if they’re not in the same department as you. Even though I had a background in communications, I got to talk to so many people across TD, even employees across Canada, just to learn more about their side of things.”
What did you learn from each of your roles at TD?
“For my first co-op, it was mostly interpersonal skills and experiencing being in the workplace for the first time. I was kind of scared to dive into it since I never had real world experience beforehand. A lot of the learning I did were things like how to speak up for myself when I have ideas and other soft skills.”
“For my second work term, there was more responsibility on my end because I was there before and they had already seen my work. I learned a lot of organization skills and got experience communicating with executives.”
“All-in-all, my co-ops have taught me so much about myself personally and professionally. I’ve gotten to learn about and improve my technical skills and soft skills.”
What sort of challenges have you faced during co-op?
“The hardest challenge for me was starting to apply for jobs. It can be overwhelming sometimes just to see how many jobs are out there on LinkedIn or WaterlooWorks. It made me second guess myself and how qualified I was for the jobs I saw. I personally try to email recruiters and see if I can get myself somewhere or network as much as I can, but the hardest part for me was having self-confidence.”
“I still struggle with it sometimes. Even after my experiences, I think about if I’m going to end up where I want to or just generally compare myself to other students. At the end of the day, I always remind myself to be grateful that I have interviews and the chance to do co-op, and everything else will fall into place.”
“I hosted a networking workshop at TD and some advice I gave for applying to jobs was to be delusional. Sometimes you have to fake it until you make it. If no one else is going to believe in your confidence, you have to believe it yourself. I cold messaged the director of communications at TikTok, she responded and now she is my mentor. My advice is that delusion can sometimes get you further.”
What are some interesting projects you’ve done during a work term?
“A project that I introduced and rolled out on my own was called Espresso Chats. I wanted to bridge the gap between interns and executive members because we felt like even though TD emphasizes their coffee culture and being tight knit, there was still a gap between executives and interns. A lot of executives wanted to be more involved with interns and I wanted to create an easier way to do that. I pitched the idea to my boss of a more compressed coffee chat, like an espresso, and she loved the idea.”
“We first made a poster with the executive’s face on it and a little quote of advice they had for interns. Then, we created a web blog for it with an invitation to schedule a coffee chat with the executive members and we saw really good results with that. The first one received over 1200 impressions.”
“We even got the CEO to do our last close off for the project. We got people from other departments outside of insurance reaching out to us and wanting to be part of it. We had to say no since it was for insurance only, but they are starting to adopt similar motives of connecting interns to executives. That was a memorable moment for me because I saw my impact not just in insurance, but in the company as a whole.”
How has co-op helped you with your career goals?
“While I worked at TD, I fell in love with product management. In my second work term, I owned the Learning Launchpad website. I owned the design of it, the strategy and I got to analyze all the data we got from it to see where we could improve. From that, I fell in love with it more than communications and I saw that I excelled in this kind of work. I was able to work on more projects and learn more about product management from that and now it’s what I’m looking for in my future co-ops.”
“Co-op in general has helped me so much. When an interviewer asked me what my weakness was I would always say public speaking because I used to be so shy and sounded like I was reading off of a script. I really pushed myself to do presentations to my colleagues during my first work term.”
“I entered a case study competition within TD, the Innovation Lab Challenge, and I won first place for pitching an artificial intelligence-powered financial tool. Standing in front of executive members from the innovation side of TD, presenting my idea then winning first place felt rewarding to me because I also got to practice my public speaking skills.”
“I’m still pretty shy so I really try to raise my hand when there’s an opportunity to do public speaking. Even now, I raise my hand to speak up on panels that are happening for my program.”
“A goal I have is to eventually host a TED Talk or be a guest speaker somewhere, so that’s where I want to build my skills towards because I have enjoyed connecting one-on-one with prospective students and students in my program to help them with their career.”
What’s next for you?
“I’m in my fourth year of university. The hard work doesn’t stop, but I feel like I’m in the time of my university life where I can take it a bit easier. I’ve put in the hard work and I can see it paying off.”
“For my next co-op term, I’m so excited to be at Manulife for global digital acceleration working alongside the Digital Product Management team. All my efforts are paying off and I’m starting my journey in product management.”
“I’m graduating in 2026 but before I move on to my career, I really want to do some travel. I went from high school to university back-to-back and I would love to experience the world.”
