Laurel Miller

Business policies that are specific to the organization can’t be learned in school, typically throughout the interview process and during the first two weeks of onboarding the new hire is exposed to the business policies that shape the culture. For example, HR policies such as hiring, benefits, training, and personal time off. As an employee and new father working at GE, I’ve learned they’re policy around paternity leave is extremely generous and follows the FMLA standards for length of leave with the added benefit of being fully paid. The longer one is with a company the more business polices they understand, such as quality, procurement, and/or marketing policies.

Dealing with different types of people in the real world can’t be taught at school. Since I want to become a project manager, it is important to know how to manage people. There are various different personalities that need to interact with each other within a project and I must learn how to get someone to do something for me even though I am not technically their boss. I have talked to many project managers at Independence Blue Cross and they say that to become a project manager you must learn how to interact and manage different types of people.

Selling products in the e-commerce is the things that I could not just learn the classroom. In class, we usually study about what is digital marketing, e-commerce, how it looks like, how can we figure the strategies for it but we did not learn the real-life skills of it. As working in the SEO position, I have to deal a lot with e-commerce skills. I started learning different new skills about this area that I had not learned in class.

There are two things I have learned at work that did not learn in a classroom. These are planing and great listener. As a project manager, data analyst and sometimes UX designer, it is very important for me to plan ahead of time and listen very carefully to the requirements that are asked to be completed. I work for one of the largest market units at SAP and report to multiple managers. In MIS 3535 and 3506 we talk about the importance of these two set of skills but putting them on practice is a whole new world. It has also improved my critical analysis skills to understand that every person is a new challenge. People work differently and is my duty to adjust to these changes.

Some lessons I learned during my internship is to make sure I am always organized and how to deal with different kinds of people. During my internship, I would be working on multiple projects and I would have a lot of work to do. I would use google calendar a lot to manage my time efficiently so that I can do my work as well as attend meetings or anything else. Also, while at my internship I learned how to deal with different people and how they like to interact. Some people were extroverts who I could just walk up to and start a conversation or talk about my projects with, while others were introverts who would rather just use slack to communicate.

One of the most important lessons I learned during my internship was the importance of tailoring communication. It is hard to know how to deal with different types of people, whether it be different personalities or different levels of authority, and I never learned any of this during school. I realized that different verbiage must be used for external communication, versus internal communication. Knowing what to say and how to say it to clients was especially challenging. I had to be very careful with wording, and sometimes it can be challenging to ensure communication is efficient, effective, follows firm guidelines, etc.

A lesson I learned during my internship that I just couldn’t learn in the classroom or from a textbook is that you need to always be prepared for your schedule to change. In the classroom, you usually will have a strict schedule that won’t really change much, but when working in this internship, I quickly learned that my schedule will be constantly changing. There are always new assignments and events that pop up out of nowhere that need to get done. In the classroom, you know everything that needs to be done and when from the beginning of the semester, but in the workplace it is not like that.

One important thing I could not learn from class was the method of organizing my code. For my MIS 3501 class, I had written a lot of code but could never organize the code I had written in a proper way. Organizing code requires a lot of commenting and maintaining a consistent pattern so that another coder can read your code properly. In my internship, however, I was given proper instructions on how to organize my code and I could see how my code was used by senior analysts. This motivated me to get into the practice of properly organizing my code and adding sufficient comments to make it comprehensible for other coders.

One of the things that I observed during my internship is that you need to continually learn and test things on your own. As one of my mentors said, being in the security field is not a 40 hour a week job. You always need to be reading about the tech industry and other complimentary industries to be up to speed with the current technology and security vulnerabilities. The most important thing I learned, is that I need to continually learn more to be able to adapt to future industry shifts and changes. One of the things he recommended is that I read not only things related to tech field, but others such as science and psychology journals.

Something that comes in handy with working is organization and good note taking. I find that the best tool for this is OneNote. I work on several different projects for my internship and I find that its impossible to remember each detail without writing them down. OneNote has many features that allow users to organize in a way that works best for them. With organization and notes, I am always able to answer questions on projects, even if I do not remember the answer off of the top of my head.

There are a lot of things that I have come across in the business world that I have had to teach myself. In the classroom, we learn about the basics, anything and everything that serves as an introduction to the field we want to pursue. But what happens when we exceed the breadth of which we have learned? Throughout my MIS courses, we have learned a whole lot about integrating, making things easier to manage, and how to leverage disruptive/innovative technologies. But when I actually came across these things in a real life scenario at my internship, I quickly realized that some things aren’t always as they seem. For instance, learning about integration and automation can only take you so far. Actually creating a workflow that simulates and executes this process is another thing, and this is what I had to teach myself in order to carry out some of my internship goals. Another example of this is some 3D printing classes that I took when I used to work at NextFab. Still classroom education right? Well, currently I am working on custom 3D print designs for a few clients and needless to say, the classroom knowledge has not nearly prepared me enough. I have been working on my own to teach myself how to do things and troubleshoot issues that I’ve come across. Fortunately, the internet is a wonderful place. Some say we don’t even need school, because now a day’s, everything is on the web…

Organizational skills cant be taught in class. Everyone has different way of organizing their documents and appointments. Some use planners some use straight memory. I found simple technological tools like outlook calendar and to-do list was very important skill that came handy. Secondly, As I was in charge of managing my department’s JAM site platform is similar to a word press drag drop site. I did not learn the platform in class but fortunately SAP had plenty of tutorials or me to learn this from.

I feel like I have been able to apply more material from Temple than a lot of my peers in MIS programs at other schools. During training, I was familiar with many of the topics covered. As training went on, many of the topics expanded on things I grazed in school, which made comprehending the expansions easier. I used a lot of process diagramming in my internship, which was covered in a few of my MIS courses. Another big topic that classes helped me with was enterprise systems. Just knowing what SAP looked like and having done a few basic actions in the system was really helpful when learning more about it. Having prior exposure to topics in class definitely made me feel more comfortable completing projects in my internship.

The technical classes like MIS 3501, 3502, 2501, and 2502 in our MIS program helped me the most during my internship. Because I have a lot of outside curiosity, I was able to try out different things in the classroom which helped me to solidify the material learned during class even better. Using these technical skills I was able to understand what was going on at certain projects when other MIS or even IST majors didn’t. An example of my application of MIS 2501 would be when we had a workshop on Active Directory (AD) and how to exploit it. Becuase we have practiced creating a domain that had Active Directory in MIS 2501, I was able to understand the workshop and follow it.

MIS 2502 (Data Analytics) is a course that has helped me tremendously in my internship. In this class, I learnt to use R and R studio which was the basis of my learning of Stata. Coding with Stata is very similar to coding with R. Since proficiency with Stata is an important requirement for my internship, I had to learn how to use Stata on my own. My knowledge of R helped me a lot to accomplish this goal. Moreover, from MIS 3501, I learned how to use loops which I also have had to use in some of my codes in my internship.

The number one skilled I learned at school was presentation skills- from all my MIS classes as well as Business Communication class. Before taking those classes I was always very nervous presenting in front of the class, but after presenting over and over again I have become more comfortable. I am able to utilize my presentation skills in my internship by presenting about what I am working on, help with training new hires, helping co-workers with their presentations, etc. At Independence Blue Cross PMO a big part of being a good project manager is being able to communicate and present. Since I want to become a project manager, classes at Temple has help me tremendously with my presentation skills.

The class that has contributed most to my internship is MIS2501. Writing the flash research papers was particularly beneficial for me because it taught me how to write concisely and deliver only key information in a time crunch, especially when writing communications to executives. While the flash research exams were quite difficult for me, I use the skills learned from writing these papers every day. Furthermore, the I use the knowledge from using virtual machines quite regularly, as many of my current projects are cyber security engineering tasks requiring the use of virtual servers and accessing them remotely.

the courses MIS2502 (Data Analytics) and MKTG3508 (Digital Marketing) provided me many skills that has leveraged my internship. For the course MIS2502, I have learned how to analyze data and create reports. These skills help me a lot since I have to analyze large number of data during the internship. Besides, the course MKTG3508 gave me the knowledge about Search Engine Optimization. My internship is Search Engine Optimization intern; therefore, I have to work a lot with finding the effective SEO strategies for the company. This class made me understand how to do it.

A class that really helped me in my internship was my Business Communications class at Temple. In that class, I learned how to write professional emails and communicate in a professional manner so I was able to leverage this in my internship. This was a very important skill for me to have because in my internship, communicating with my team, bosses, and clients were a major key to my success within the internship. If I never took the Business Communications class, I would not have known how to write a business professional email or how to present well to my team and clients.

The courses that assisted me the most at my internship were MIS2502 (Data Analytics) and MIS 2501 (Enterprise IT Architecture). For the MIS2502 class, the excel skills that were taught in the form of data analysis were invaluable because excel is a central application that is used to keep track of everything. Additionally, MIS2501 helped when I was doing an Active Directory Audit. In the planning meetings for this audit, there was confusion about where the active directory users and computers were located, and I used the information that I learned in this course in this meeting. Unfortunately, they assigned me to Unix/ Linux audits and they assigned the other intern to windows audits, so I helped her with the knowledge that I learned from MIS2501.

The courses that have helped me the most throughout my internship have been MIS 3506 (Business Analyst) and MIS 3535 (Project Management). I learned all the terminology to start and finish a real world project in a business setting and also the ability to lead a real project from start to finish. 3506 taught me how to collect requirements, model processes, data and design solutions to client problems. I performed similar tasks with the current project I am on as I wrote requirements , risk analysis and also use cases. The presentation skills through these two courses really helped me present my status reports to the IT shareholders within the organization. The MIS program helped me succeed in my internship.

The two courses that have helped me the most in my current internship have been Excel for Business Application (BA 2104) and Data Analytics (MIS 2502). Excel for Business Application taught me how to fully utilize Excel in a business setting through advanced applications. Since most of the data is placed onto an excel file at my internship, we use these advanced excel skills learned to analyze the data. Data Analytics taught me about SQL and R and data overall. Currently, we are testing a data set to see how likely consumers are to buy a certain product at a baseball stadium based on the factors of weather, day of week and opponent. By learning R, I am able to test and see if there is a correlation between any of the factors. The Fox School of Business curriculum has certainly helped me in my internship.

For me the most useful skill I’ve learned and leveraged from school is the importance of networking. Grades, work ethic, skill, knowledge, and everything else that one works to develop will only take you so far before it is who you know rather than what; the exception would be if you were maybe in the top five percentiles. That’s not to discourage anyone either, I’m just saying the culture of our society as well as others, tend to favor strong relationships. Leveraging networks, opens the door to opportunities we don’t even see are there., almost by coincidence.

At SAP, I have significant data analysis and BI work. I have developed this skill from my data science and data analytics class. The excel formulas, tips and trips I learned in these classes has made my job easier. Lumira, a Business Intelligence program by SAP is very similar to Tableau which I learned in Data Science. The skills I learned in these classes helped with data related tasks. I am learning many project management skills in MIS 3535 that I have used while managing short projects at SAP.

The classroom has helped me a lot with all types of jobs. Especially, this internship. The task I had was vague. “Create a version 2.0, but version 1.0 is great” I really had to focus on thinking outside the box and going at the project in a different way. I broke everything down and looked at each part. What did everyone like at each separate part? What could be done differently? How could it be different and more effective? From there, I used the skills I learned in MIS3501 to learn Microsoft access and create a new tool for the team.