MIS 3581
MIS 3581 is a class that essentially encapsulates what was accomplished while completing an internship. In this class I created status reports based on the work I did, made posts to the class page about my experience, and a final power point project about the entire experience. Here is some information on my internship:
-Over the summer I had the pleasure to intern at Cross America Partners LP, a company owned by a larger firm called CST Brands. CST was actually bought out by a Canadian company called Couche-Tard. The location of the firm is in Allentown, PA. The offices are located in the beautiful downtown area inside the Three City Center building. The company is a publicly traded master limited partnership that is a leading wholesale distributor of motor fuels and owner and lessee of real estate used in the retail distribution of motor fuels.
-I learned a lot about how culture of office level business work. I had only worked in retail previous to this internship, and some have good and bad culture. But it was different when working at Cross America. The people were a lot more friendly and the environment seemed less uptight. I think this was because we never had to deal with random customers like you do with retailers. The only customers were with people who had built up relationships.
-MIS 2502 was the most helpful class in my internship. The Microsoft Excel class was also useful. There was a lengthy amount of work to do in Excel while working in my internship, and learning about pivot tables and various queries in both of these classes definitely set me up for success. Cross America’s previous interns came in with less knowledge of the program, so they were pleasantly surprised by how well I knew the program. Learning SQL in MIS 2502 was also beneficial. I often had to use queries in order to search and change data while working. The classroom was very influential in my work.
-I learned to chat about everyday things with my superiors and co-workers in addition to discussing work. It was nice to actually be contributing to a company. Classes do not have a real world impact like working an internship does, and I liked that what I was doing mattered to the economy.