Information Systems Intern
What is/was your job function, and what does a typical day entail?
I worked on the Employee Experience Services Productivity and Collaboration team, EXS Productivity and Collaboration for short. My leader was Amber, a service manager who handles the Cisco collaboration services. The project I was given for the summer was to create a dashboard with automated capabilities for the managers under EXS Prod. and Collab. to view high level metrics. This will allow them to gain quick, actionable insights and greater visibility in order to determine the health of their services. An average day for me would consist of meeting with co-workers to gather data and/or learn certain processes, working with the data in Power BI to build out the dashboards, and attending intern events such as lunches with directors, site tours, teambuilding exercises, and many more.
How did you find out about this opportunity, and what was the interview process like?
Thanks to Temple’s IBIT (Institute for Business and Information Technology)’s IT Career Fair, I got to speak with a representative from Dow and a Temple alum who worked at Dow. Following this great conversation, I gave them my resume, followed up with an email, and eventually got offered an interview after submitting my online application. Given I’d be working at the Dow headquarters in Midland, Michigan, I was given a phone interview, which went rather smoothly. A couple weeks after the interview, I was offered the internship for the summer.
How has your internship related to your course work?
MIS is the incorporation of technology to make a business better. My entire team was oriented around this core concept. EXS for Dow is the Global Information Systems team that makes sure a Fortune 100 company consisting of over 50,000 employees worldwide can run as smoothly as it does leveraging technology. Thanks to the courses I’ve been exposed to and my professors, I came into my internship understanding how I could impact the company before ever stepping foot inside it. I attribute much of my preparation to MIS0855 (Data Science) as well as MIS2101 (Information Systems in Organizations)
What is the most important thing you’ve learned during your internship/job experience?
I’ve learned so much about what it means to collaborate. The “new Dow” has been pushed a lot when us interns first arrived, and the new catchphrase they’re pushing for is “Seek Together”. Whether it was doing my own work or observing my peers and leaders, I began to really understand that no matter how hard you try, you will always be better off working collaboratively than being a lone wolf. There is so much knowledge and experience around you that the best thing for you to do is to constantly be a sponge.