Preferred Sands
During this past summer, I completed an internship at Preferred Sands. Preferred is a very interesting company in terms of what they do and how they began doing it. Preferred used to be a real estate development company until the mid-2000’s. The company then pulled out of the real estate industry and started selling sand, a “proppant”. A proppant is used in order to help extract for natural gas or petroleum through the process of fracturing.
Aside from the super interesting company and history of Preferred, my role in the IT department was just as interesting. Preferred as multiple queries around the United States, Canada, and is quickly expanding around the world. However, most of the locations outside of the headquarters in Radnor have third party IT support or the main Radnor office supports their IT. I worked in the Radnor office with a group of 8 people in the department. For Preferred, I was shown a little bit of everything! I was given a project to work on during downtime where I was to move backups from discs to a NAS. In addition, I was exposed to what each person at Preferred did. For example, one employee showed me how their ERP system worked and I helped with testing with it too. Another employee was responsible for generating reports using SSRS, which I was exposed to. Then, I was able to see the day-to-day side of everything! One employee was responsible for managing all the IT related to each employee so was able to see that. Ultimately, my internship was an awesome experience and one where I gained a great deal of knowledge in the field of IT and more importantly how every little component of it connects back to the business as a whole!