Laurel Miller

Business policies that are specific to the organization can’t be learned in school, typically throughout the interview process and during the first two weeks of onboarding the new hire is exposed to the business policies that shape the culture. For example, HR policies such as hiring, benefits, training, and personal time off. As an employee and new father working at GE, I’ve learned they’re policy around paternity leave is extremely generous and follows the FMLA standards for length of leave with the added benefit of being fully paid. The longer one is with a company the more business polices they understand, such as quality, procurement, and/or marketing policies.

Dealing with different types of people in the real world can’t be taught at school. Since I want to become a project manager, it is important to know how to manage people. There are various different personalities that need to interact with each other within a project and I must learn how to get someone to do something for me even though I am not technically their boss. I have talked to many project managers at Independence Blue Cross and they say that to become a project manager you must learn how to interact and manage different types of people.

Selling products in the e-commerce is the things that I could not just learn the classroom. In class, we usually study about what is digital marketing, e-commerce, how it looks like, how can we figure the strategies for it but we did not learn the real-life skills of it. As working in the SEO position, I have to deal a lot with e-commerce skills. I started learning different new skills about this area that I had not learned in class.

There are two things I have learned at work that did not learn in a classroom. These are planing and great listener. As a project manager, data analyst and sometimes UX designer, it is very important for me to plan ahead of time and listen very carefully to the requirements that are asked to be completed. I work for one of the largest market units at SAP and report to multiple managers. In MIS 3535 and 3506 we talk about the importance of these two set of skills but putting them on practice is a whole new world. It has also improved my critical analysis skills to understand that every person is a new challenge. People work differently and is my duty to adjust to these changes.

Some lessons I learned during my internship is to make sure I am always organized and how to deal with different kinds of people. During my internship, I would be working on multiple projects and I would have a lot of work to do. I would use google calendar a lot to manage my time efficiently so that I can do my work as well as attend meetings or anything else. Also, while at my internship I learned how to deal with different people and how they like to interact. Some people were extroverts who I could just walk up to and start a conversation or talk about my projects with, while others were introverts who would rather just use slack to communicate.

One of the most important lessons I learned during my internship was the importance of tailoring communication. It is hard to know how to deal with different types of people, whether it be different personalities or different levels of authority, and I never learned any of this during school. I realized that different verbiage must be used for external communication, versus internal communication. Knowing what to say and how to say it to clients was especially challenging. I had to be very careful with wording, and sometimes it can be challenging to ensure communication is efficient, effective, follows firm guidelines, etc.

A lesson I learned during my internship that I just couldn’t learn in the classroom or from a textbook is that you need to always be prepared for your schedule to change. In the classroom, you usually will have a strict schedule that won’t really change much, but when working in this internship, I quickly learned that my schedule will be constantly changing. There are always new assignments and events that pop up out of nowhere that need to get done. In the classroom, you know everything that needs to be done and when from the beginning of the semester, but in the workplace it is not like that.

One important thing I could not learn from class was the method of organizing my code. For my MIS 3501 class, I had written a lot of code but could never organize the code I had written in a proper way. Organizing code requires a lot of commenting and maintaining a consistent pattern so that another coder can read your code properly. In my internship, however, I was given proper instructions on how to organize my code and I could see how my code was used by senior analysts. This motivated me to get into the practice of properly organizing my code and adding sufficient comments to make it comprehensible for other coders.

One of the things that I observed during my internship is that you need to continually learn and test things on your own. As one of my mentors said, being in the security field is not a 40 hour a week job. You always need to be reading about the tech industry and other complimentary industries to be up to speed with the current technology and security vulnerabilities. The most important thing I learned, is that I need to continually learn more to be able to adapt to future industry shifts and changes. One of the things he recommended is that I read not only things related to tech field, but others such as science and psychology journals.

Something that comes in handy with working is organization and good note taking. I find that the best tool for this is OneNote. I work on several different projects for my internship and I find that its impossible to remember each detail without writing them down. OneNote has many features that allow users to organize in a way that works best for them. With organization and notes, I am always able to answer questions on projects, even if I do not remember the answer off of the top of my head.

There are a lot of things that I have come across in the business world that I have had to teach myself. In the classroom, we learn about the basics, anything and everything that serves as an introduction to the field we want to pursue. But what happens when we exceed the breadth of which we have learned? Throughout my MIS courses, we have learned a whole lot about integrating, making things easier to manage, and how to leverage disruptive/innovative technologies. But when I actually came across these things in a real life scenario at my internship, I quickly realized that some things aren’t always as they seem. For instance, learning about integration and automation can only take you so far. Actually creating a workflow that simulates and executes this process is another thing, and this is what I had to teach myself in order to carry out some of my internship goals. Another example of this is some 3D printing classes that I took when I used to work at NextFab. Still classroom education right? Well, currently I am working on custom 3D print designs for a few clients and needless to say, the classroom knowledge has not nearly prepared me enough. I have been working on my own to teach myself how to do things and troubleshoot issues that I’ve come across. Fortunately, the internet is a wonderful place. Some say we don’t even need school, because now a day’s, everything is on the web…

Organizational skills cant be taught in class. Everyone has different way of organizing their documents and appointments. Some use planners some use straight memory. I found simple technological tools like outlook calendar and to-do list was very important skill that came handy. Secondly, As I was in charge of managing my department’s JAM site platform is similar to a word press drag drop site. I did not learn the platform in class but fortunately SAP had plenty of tutorials or me to learn this from.

Not everything is learned in the classroom. I see that more and more every job and activity that I participate in. Something that I learned outside of the classroom and in my internship is that not everything works on the timeline initially created. Things come up, people are on time off, or there is another pressing issue. Working with an attitude of being flexible and willing to cut back or push harder is important.

The real experience and feeling when managing different projects. When i first taking project management courses, it lectures us how to effectively deal with obstacles in the project. At first i do not feel anything until i actually start managing projects during my internship. During the projects i encountered challenges because the software does not meet the expectations of the stakeholders, and some stakeholders don’t really understand the purpose of the BI applications. At times it does feel frustrated sometimes, but that is the time you have to be patient and observant of why they feel reluctant to changes. Moreover, the politics and culture is really important on having a nice experience in your internship. By gaining knowledge and experience on these aspects, i gradually find myself being more comfortable in a position i don’t feel comfortable when i first start my internship.

Something that I learned during my internship that I couldn’t learn in the classroom or from a textbook is scheduling/ time management. The ability to independently create your own schedule is a vital skill in the business world. I am a person who tends to get bored very easily, so I needed to plan my time accordingly so that I could switch seamlessly between projects and assignments. Although scheduling may not seem like a topic that is expensive, it is an important skill because work completion is always a number one priority. It is also important to schedule around other people’s schedules because they could be very busy, or unavailable.

Some of the skills that I’ve learned specifically from my internship are skills that I’ve gained from interacting with more complex computing systems. One person can only really afford so much in terms of computing power, so the only place you can get true experience with a lot of these larger platforms is through working for a firm that utilizes them. There’s only so much knowledge you can really get from reading a book about them, so until you work in an environment that lets you get your hands dirty, you don’t really get the full experience using that platform. Lastly, you definitely don’t learn about soft-skill workplace social issues in a textbook, or at the very least, you can’t learn from them the same way so that’s been something really helpful to learn from over the course of this co-op.

Something I learned at my internship that I couldn’t have learned in the classroom was how to communicate out data findings. Being an MIS major, we are very skilled on how to interpret data in advanced ways. Yet, not everyone is as advanced with reading data as we are and you have to come up with new ways to get your point across without confusing anyone. This has taught me a-lot about data visualization, using visuals to help interpret the data. Having heavily used the Microsoft Suite at my internship, powerpoint and excel worked great and allowed me to easily create charts to help understand the data. Still, though, these can be a little overwhelming at first glance which also helped me learn how to effectively call out a data point. Given at any given stand there are over 500 “chargeables” creating callouts helped me pinpoint exactly where I wanted my audience to pay attention.

I feel like I have been able to apply more material from Temple than a lot of my peers in MIS programs at other schools. During training, I was familiar with many of the topics covered. As training went on, many of the topics expanded on things I grazed in school, which made comprehending the expansions easier. I used a lot of process diagramming in my internship, which was covered in a few of my MIS courses. Another big topic that classes helped me with was enterprise systems. Just knowing what SAP looked like and having done a few basic actions in the system was really helpful when learning more about it. Having prior exposure to topics in class definitely made me feel more comfortable completing projects in my internship.

The technical classes like MIS 3501, 3502, 2501, and 2502 in our MIS program helped me the most during my internship. Because I have a lot of outside curiosity, I was able to try out different things in the classroom which helped me to solidify the material learned during class even better. Using these technical skills I was able to understand what was going on at certain projects when other MIS or even IST majors didn’t. An example of my application of MIS 2501 would be when we had a workshop on Active Directory (AD) and how to exploit it. Becuase we have practiced creating a domain that had Active Directory in MIS 2501, I was able to understand the workshop and follow it.

MIS 2502 (Data Analytics) is a course that has helped me tremendously in my internship. In this class, I learnt to use R and R studio which was the basis of my learning of Stata. Coding with Stata is very similar to coding with R. Since proficiency with Stata is an important requirement for my internship, I had to learn how to use Stata on my own. My knowledge of R helped me a lot to accomplish this goal. Moreover, from MIS 3501, I learned how to use loops which I also have had to use in some of my codes in my internship.

The number one skilled I learned at school was presentation skills- from all my MIS classes as well as Business Communication class. Before taking those classes I was always very nervous presenting in front of the class, but after presenting over and over again I have become more comfortable. I am able to utilize my presentation skills in my internship by presenting about what I am working on, help with training new hires, helping co-workers with their presentations, etc. At Independence Blue Cross PMO a big part of being a good project manager is being able to communicate and present. Since I want to become a project manager, classes at Temple has help me tremendously with my presentation skills.

The class that has contributed most to my internship is MIS2501. Writing the flash research papers was particularly beneficial for me because it taught me how to write concisely and deliver only key information in a time crunch, especially when writing communications to executives. While the flash research exams were quite difficult for me, I use the skills learned from writing these papers every day. Furthermore, the I use the knowledge from using virtual machines quite regularly, as many of my current projects are cyber security engineering tasks requiring the use of virtual servers and accessing them remotely.

the courses MIS2502 (Data Analytics) and MKTG3508 (Digital Marketing) provided me many skills that has leveraged my internship. For the course MIS2502, I have learned how to analyze data and create reports. These skills help me a lot since I have to analyze large number of data during the internship. Besides, the course MKTG3508 gave me the knowledge about Search Engine Optimization. My internship is Search Engine Optimization intern; therefore, I have to work a lot with finding the effective SEO strategies for the company. This class made me understand how to do it.

A class that really helped me in my internship was my Business Communications class at Temple. In that class, I learned how to write professional emails and communicate in a professional manner so I was able to leverage this in my internship. This was a very important skill for me to have because in my internship, communicating with my team, bosses, and clients were a major key to my success within the internship. If I never took the Business Communications class, I would not have known how to write a business professional email or how to present well to my team and clients.

The courses that assisted me the most at my internship were MIS2502 (Data Analytics) and MIS 2501 (Enterprise IT Architecture). For the MIS2502 class, the excel skills that were taught in the form of data analysis were invaluable because excel is a central application that is used to keep track of everything. Additionally, MIS2501 helped when I was doing an Active Directory Audit. In the planning meetings for this audit, there was confusion about where the active directory users and computers were located, and I used the information that I learned in this course in this meeting. Unfortunately, they assigned me to Unix/ Linux audits and they assigned the other intern to windows audits, so I helped her with the knowledge that I learned from MIS2501.

The courses that have helped me the most throughout my internship have been MIS 3506 (Business Analyst) and MIS 3535 (Project Management). I learned all the terminology to start and finish a real world project in a business setting and also the ability to lead a real project from start to finish. 3506 taught me how to collect requirements, model processes, data and design solutions to client problems. I performed similar tasks with the current project I am on as I wrote requirements , risk analysis and also use cases. The presentation skills through these two courses really helped me present my status reports to the IT shareholders within the organization. The MIS program helped me succeed in my internship.

The two courses that have helped me the most in my current internship have been Excel for Business Application (BA 2104) and Data Analytics (MIS 2502). Excel for Business Application taught me how to fully utilize Excel in a business setting through advanced applications. Since most of the data is placed onto an excel file at my internship, we use these advanced excel skills learned to analyze the data. Data Analytics taught me about SQL and R and data overall. Currently, we are testing a data set to see how likely consumers are to buy a certain product at a baseball stadium based on the factors of weather, day of week and opponent. By learning R, I am able to test and see if there is a correlation between any of the factors. The Fox School of Business curriculum has certainly helped me in my internship.

For me the most useful skill I’ve learned and leveraged from school is the importance of networking. Grades, work ethic, skill, knowledge, and everything else that one works to develop will only take you so far before it is who you know rather than what; the exception would be if you were maybe in the top five percentiles. That’s not to discourage anyone either, I’m just saying the culture of our society as well as others, tend to favor strong relationships. Leveraging networks, opens the door to opportunities we don’t even see are there., almost by coincidence.

At SAP, I have significant data analysis and BI work. I have developed this skill from my data science and data analytics class. The excel formulas, tips and trips I learned in these classes has made my job easier. Lumira, a Business Intelligence program by SAP is very similar to Tableau which I learned in Data Science. The skills I learned in these classes helped with data related tasks. I am learning many project management skills in MIS 3535 that I have used while managing short projects at SAP.

The classroom has helped me a lot with all types of jobs. Especially, this internship. The task I had was vague. “Create a version 2.0, but version 1.0 is great” I really had to focus on thinking outside the box and going at the project in a different way. I broke everything down and looked at each part. What did everyone like at each separate part? What could be done differently? How could it be different and more effective? From there, I used the skills I learned in MIS3501 to learn Microsoft access and create a new tool for the team.

Based on the experience I had from the internship I realized how MIS is beneficial to the job on the following points:

Data analytics: Utilize Excel to find detailed information; moreover, by using the “data analysis”, “Pivot table” functions to complete data analysis.
Project Management: How I use the skills: See, Feel and Change to change the attitude among executives, and how to prepare documents for the project.
IT Architecture: Learning how to use VM, joining Domain, creating groups, and managing the internal network.
MIS 3506: How I gather all of the essential requirements from the stakeholders, documents the requirements and validate the project making sure the project reaches the majority of the demands.

Things that I have learned in the classroom that I used throughout my internship was the web development skills(MIS 3501), document business requirements(MIS 3506), and project management skills(MIS 3535). During my internship, I did not write any code, but there were times where I had to understand the code and what it was doing and learning functions, variables, etc. from MIS 3501 helped me throughout my internship. For multiple projects that I was on I had to create business requirement documents and then turn those requirements into user stories for the developers, learning how to document requirements effectively in MIS 3506 helped me with this portion of my internship. Last, I worked with project managers during my internship to estimate the cost of a project, draft status reports, and lead team meetings. I did all of this in MIS 3535 so having that experience definitely helped so i could contribute during my internship.

Data analysis skills from classes like Data Analytics as well as the gen-ed Data-science have been a big help here. Also softer skills that help with work presentations and communicating with my co-workers have been a huge help. I think FOX has definitely adequately prepped me for the working world, while things may not mirror our academic experiences, they definitely gave me enough of a background to be able to handle different work problems, when they occur.

At times it can be difficult to manage working and being in school full time but its all about time management. I would suggest either writing things down in a planner or putting things in your Google calendar. It helps me when I put all tasks that need to be done like homework, studying for an exam, tasks for work, etc. My phone gives me a reminder because one person can only remember so much. Also, it helps me to relieve stress because if you don’t write things down or store them somewhere than you will constantly have it in your head and it will be stressful.

The most important tool in order manage time between internship and schoolwork is to plan well ahead of time as much as possible. All courses usually have most of the assignments, exams, and deliverables outlined at the beginning of the semester.Therefore, it is important to locate those times of the semester during which you can expect there to be a lot of pressure. Therefore, it would be wise to prepare for the exams or assignments for these times beforehand. This can help to relieve a lot of pressure during high-demand times.

I keep a pretty detailed schedule in google calendar and sync those activities across my devices so that I can be on top of what I need to do. This is important in regards to slicing out time for relaxing and blowing off steam. Articulating clear expectations about work schedule and work tasks is also incredibly import for organizing time to study as well.

It can be challenging to manage your school work with your internship, but there are ways to make it easier to manage. The things that I do and the tips I would have for managing the both together would be to buy a planner. The planner makes it easier to organize the work that needs to be done and when it needs to be done. It helps with choosing which work you should get done first. Also, another tip I would have is to not procrastinate on your school work. The earlier you start on your school work, the less stressed you will be when managing it along with your internship.

I love to believe I’m an organized person, however there’s always going to be a time or two something takes priority over another and you have to delegate, delay, or dismiss a task. Our office uses Outlook Office365 ProPlus and the calendar syncs to my iPhone which syncs to my apple watch. When there’s a meeting or task assigned I get an alert. GE operates globally in 170 + countries with an employee base over 295K its difficult scheduling a meeting where everyone’s available. Skills that allow you to organize and prioritize your work load are essential. I like to take notes in OneNote which I can look at on my iPad or Phone and position first by deadline then by priority. It’s not foolproof but it helps, although I did just submit my status report 2 a day late.

The first time experiencing working 20 hours part-time internship and studying at school can be hard. I suggest schedule everything carefully, Since working and studying together, there will be many things that need to accomplish. what I do is that I create a reminder on my phone with all the deadlines for assignments at school. By that way, I never forgot or passed the deadlines. I keep updating that reminder every day before I go to bed and check to see if there will be anything I needed to do tomorrow. That is how I balance my schoolwork and internship.

One of the things that I do is I plan my day ahead the night before. It takes only about 5-7 minutes but saves a lot of time the next day. Another thing that I do is write everything out in my reminders. While this may not be the greatest thing to improve one’s memory, it helps to minimize forgetfulness and reminds me of when I need to do a certain task. This ensures that I’m not late for any deadlines for assignments or work that I have to do.

Completing work tasks is fairly easy to stay on top of,as, for me, they do not typically veer outside of my working hours. Sometimes, schoolwork can fall through the cracks, though. To stay on top of things, I use a no-frills to-do list. I use the sticky notes app on my laptop, and list out my courses. For the current week, the previous week (if something lingers), and the upcoming week, I list all my assignments and tasks to do under the course header. As I complete items, I simply put an “X” next to the task. I have used a paper agenda before, and I find that this works much better as I don’t have to remember to look at it; it’s right in front of me every time I open my computer (which is far more than I did my agenda). For my availability and schedule, I use Google calendars, and simply block out my classes, work times, and any other important things such as doctors appointments.

Balancing work and school is not easy, but I have found that spending some time on keeping everything organized helps the most. First, I have the privilege of working and going to school on opposite days, which helps in not getting mixed up between tasks. Second, I keep a planner with work and school tasks so that I can see my week/month laid out and am able to plan ahead if there is a certain week that I am busier than others. This planning ahead is key to time/stress management come midterm season! I also have a school task/reminder list and a work task/reminder list so that I may focus on each area separately, these items are stored centrally on my OneNote. Items are crossed off when they are complete, and I move on to the next task.

Balance is key. Luckily, at the time I was doing the internship it was over the summer. That being said, I was working it full time and balancing a couple projects that I was working on. So, it is definitely key to stick ahead of schedule and note that you need to get XYZ done by X date so you can ensure that nothing will fall behind. Overall. it was great to learn and work – life balance will be extremely real for me come May. So, it was good to get an idea of what that will look like in the future.

For the past year I have been working 25 hours a week at my internship while also attending classes full time. Balance is definitely important if you want to succeed at both and not under perform at school or at work. I was not able to take my classes and work on different days so I mostly chose to take many night class. I attended work during the day and classes at night and luckily my job gave me an hour or two a day to prep for school. I tried to plan ahead the night before for any assignments and homework where due. This year has taught me a lot of useful organizational methods as I tried to balance work and classes together.

I am huge with checklists. I always immediately write down everything I need to do and put a box next to it. I also was able to prioritize each objective by placing a star or highlighting what needed to be done sooner. Additionally, I always set reminders for myself. Most of the time they are through Google Calendars, or I can tell Siri “Remind me about xyz on Tuesday at 3 PM” and it will work well.

Luckily, my Internship falls on days I don’t have class, but I still have to worry about what’s due the following day when I do have class. I have found that using a planner can help out immensely. Being a very visual person, it is great to see everything on page of what I have due in the coming days/weeks. With those in mind I make sure to create checkpoints along the way, and schedule out tasks that need to be completed. This has saved both time and stress when trying to balance school and work.

Micromanaging time is necessary esp for me as I have two part-time jobs including my internship and full-time school work. Having the work-life balance is critical. I use tools like google calendar it helps me organize my tasks and meetings. I find the inbuilt checklist feature in google calendar very helpful. I also have solid time slots allocated for school work and internship work. This approach may seem siloed but it works well as I like to that both work and school differentiated.

The best way to balance the working life and school works are time management. This semester i start using scheduled mapping as my primary tool for time management (AKA calendar). By planning everything ahead of time usually a month before the due date, and recorded the tasks to the calendar to keep track of the works needed to be done. At times it gets difficult sometimes especially when all of the tests, assignments and works all packed together. However, by allocating sufficient time to it, it just get easier and easier.

The most important tip I can give to be able to handle school work and the internship is to work ahead of time as well as use google calendar. I would try and get any school work I had to do done a few days ahead of time so then I could worry about actual work only. At times when I had a lot going on I would always use google calendar so that I could check my schedule for each day and so I can manage my time most effectively.