IT Intern, Emerging Talent Program
- At Merck & Co. Inc., I was an IT intern in the Global Service Functions division, who focused on facilities management, user experience, and continuous improvement of existing processes.
- I completed Data Analytics projects for Merck’s Internal Communications team, and using analytics and visualizations to establish what drives readership. I then created guidelines for Internal Communications news postings, including a guideline to headline creation and a guideline for providing interesting content to readers, and my analysis increased company news readership by 50%. I also improved facilities management software by using analytics and visualizations to identify broken monitoring equipment. I extracted data from an internal interface, analyzed and parsed the data, and then organized it using Microsoft Excel. I then created visualizations with the data, and presented this data to my team. My analysis was used to identify and repair/replace broken equipment. Lastly, I helped to optimize an internal web tool, using user experience principles, and I then recorded a training video to teach employees how to use the improved interface. This project improved overall use of the web tool, and helped normalize data received from the web tool.
- What I learned in my internship experience directly relates to many of my core classes, especially Data Analytics and Digital Design and Innovation Studio. I took Data Analytics prior to my internship, and this class helped me because I was able to use R Studio to parse text extracted from a server. Data Analytics also taught me how to analyze and present data effectively, which was extremely helpful when I needed to present my visualizations in team meetings. My experience at Merck helped me in my Digital Design and Innovation Studio class that I took this Fall 2018, because I already knew many user experience principles. This helped my team and I build and effective and easy to use prototype. My curriculum helped my internship at Merck, and in turn my internship at Merck has helped my curriculum.