Operations Intern
Had the honor of being the operations intern for Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation, a pediatric cancer organization dedicated to finding a cure for childhood cancer. Daily activities included fulfilling merchandise orders, searching old spreadsheets for past customer data, updating the Shopify gift shop, performing audits on the site, and analyzing merchandise sales to find common themes, etc. However, many activities required an element of MIS. For example, I performed a usability test on both the main site (www.alexslemonade.org) and the gift shop (www.shop.alexslemonade.org). After performing the usability test on the shop, I was given the duty to completely redesign the site, adding filters, changing the layout, and editing the code on Shopify to add a “continue shopping” button and to edit the main menu. Secondly. I used SQL almost daily to analyze Shopify data. In this process I used commands like “FROM sales SHOW product_type, total_sales, cogs, gross_sales SINCE last_year GROUP BY product_type” to find the highest selling products this year. Finally, our summer-long group intern project required me to perform a mobile audit on www.alexslemonade.org, where I compared the mobile site to the desktop site. During this audit, I was asked to provide any feedback on the UX of the site, check for error trapping, and test the breadcrumbs. In my audit, I discovered that some of the breadcrumbs failed to work, the formatting of some of the photos and videos cutoff part of the text, and that the social media icons were far too big. This made a huge impact on the foundation, as 70% of our users are mobile.
Throughout this process, I learned how to use Shopify, how to ship products, how to use Excel efficiently, and much more. However, I think the two most important things I learned were how to work in an office and how to apply my major to a job. At ALSF, I was required to work 9-5, with a 30-minute lunch break. I think this adjustment from working an untraditional college job will prove to be valuable when I enter the workforce. Second, it was cool to see how what I’ve learned as an MIS student can be applied to your job. Obviously, not my entire job was based around information systems, but I used some form of MIS every single day, and I learned what having a degree in MIS really looks like in the real world. I believe what I learned in my role here will prove to help me complete my final semester of college, but most importantly, help me as I enter the workforce after college.
I attached in a single PDF file my offer letter, along with a letter from my manager, mapping out my projects, day-to-day activities, and how this internship related to MIS and prepared me for the workforce