Summer 2016 Internship
During the Summer of 2016 I was fortunate enough to intern with the biggest insurance provider in Pennsylvania, Highmark Inc. Highmark is an non-for-profit company with several for-profit subsidiaries. I worked in one of those for-profit subsidiaries, being HM Health Solutions. HM Health Solutions is the Information Technology sector of Highmark, as we managed and were in control of all IT systems and applications for the entire corporation.
My specific role was a Release Manager. A Release Manager is responsible for releasing updates to a specific domain on a bi-weekly basis. These updates are released late Friday night, and through Saturday. Updates are released at this time in-case of system outages and/or release problems. If these do occur, there will be no down time for the business as a result. A release manager can be looked at as a Project Manager of a domain. They are responsible for coordinating an implementation plan every other week for a certain domain. A Release Manager will be in constant contact with the employees of that domain in order to gauge an idea of what updates are needed. They will then finalize their implementation plan and release the contents of that plan on release night.
As an intern, there were several long term projects that I worked on in addition to my daily Release Manager tasks. The first thing I was assigned to do was to create a notification system for the state-of-the-art IBM Urban Code Release system. This was the system that all Release Managers and Build Masters used to release domain updates. I had to learn the in and outs of the system and grasp an idea of how to use the notification feature. I talked to all parties involved to gauge an idea of what kind of notifications they wanted, and when they wanted them. After many weeks of planning what was needed, I made a notification system coded through IBM’s Velocity Template Language, that sent emails at important times of the release. For example, an email would be sent to the appropriate parties when a task was finished, failed, or started late. There were many other notifications that I built into the system. The system that I built was tested on the big quarterly release and worked just as planned. My manager informed me that the system I built, would be used on a regular basis after the conclusion of internship. This made me very happy because I created something that would have a long lasting impact on the department.
A very unique aspect to my internship was the emphasis on expanding my network and learning as much about new things as I could. My manager encouraged me to reach out to other employees and executives in the business. With that being said, I took it upon myself to reach out to the VP of my department. I ended up building a strong relationship with her and she even ended up assigning me projects of her own. She assigned me an application translation project where I was responsible for mapping every single system, application and database to a certain business domain. By doing this, it made Highmark’s customer entities experience more enjoyable because when everything is mapped to a specific business domain, we would be able to let the customer know when a change would affect them. I was able to successfully map the many hundreds of systems, applications, and databases to a very specific business domain. Before my internship ended, I even came up with a project plan for the VP’s and managers to actually implement the mapping later in the year. This was another accomplishment that I was very proud of because I was able to make a long-lasting impact.
In addition to all of that, I reached out to many other manager and VP’s in the company to learn more about what they do. I also reached out to a Project Manager and Business Analyst to learn their responsibilities and even helped them with small tasks along the way. I even found the time to learn and get hands on experience with a mainframe. All-in-all my internship experience was something that I will always cherish as I learned many new things. It is something that will have a long lasting impact on my future professional career.
