Internship Experience
Spring 2015
I am currently a proud employee of North Star Resource Group. I was presented with the opportunity to work at North Star throughout my final semester at school. North Star is a financial advising company that assists clients in building a strong financial strategy for the future including disability insurance specialists, administrative support members, financial planners, investment specialists and brokerage services. We work together to develop a strong financial strategy for individuals and families.
North Star originally hired me as a client relationship coordinator. I am currently part of the LoneStar Division. This division specializes on working with Physicians and Dentists throughout the greater Philadelphia, Deleware, and New Jersey. As you can imagine, there are countless amounts of physicians that North Star intends to reach out to. North Star hired me to simplify the massive amount of data into a concise and useful way to portray the information. With my formal experience with Hadoop that I acquired at Merck, I was able to do accurate portfolio evaluation and risk analysis and build sophisticated models that are hard to jam into a database engine.
At my time here at North Star I have learned a great deal. I accomplished many things that I didn’t know I was able to. Since North Star does not have a big IT team, I was able to gain a lot of experience in working in desk side assistance and even some call center experience. All in all, I think this internship has thrown me into many unexpected situations, and I think that is what helped me learn so much.
Summer 2014
After spending three months working at Merck, I can say that I was able to gain so much experience in the Pharmaceutical Industry. Throughout the summer, I worked in Animal Health IT as a member of the Account Managed Services team. The responsibility of my team was to support the functionality of the AH-IT as a whole.
My specific role on the team was to focus on the expenditures of the AMS team and create a model that provided a central location for key data from purchase orders regarding any AMS cost centers. At first, this role seemed a bit overwhelming; especially when I was looking at big data from cost centers all over the world. It was a bit scary to try and comprehend all of the international finances while finding a way to make it more understandable for my team. However, I grasped the concept of building models and using pivot tables along with other tools I learned in the classroom. It was amazing to me to see how easy it was for me to handle certain situations just based on the content I’ve learned in the classroom.
This experience required me to take on a lot of information at a very fast pace. It was definitely a challenge, but I enjoyed every second of it. I can honestly say that I was able to learn something new every day. I was fortunate to have the opportunity of being exposed to so many different software and emerging technologies. Merck is at the top of the Pharmaceutical Industry, and I couldn’t be more proud to learn from one of the leading companies in the world.
Summer 2013
I had the opportunity to intern at LSI in their IT Department before they were recently bought by Avago Technologies. I worked on the Server Admin team where we maintained and built over 1,300 physical and virtual servers. Working at LSI was quite an amazing experience as I had the chance to see how IT supports and drives the world of optoelectronic components. On the Server Admin team, I was immersed in what is, really, the backbone of computing and the foundation of information technology-without a strong server infrastructure, all business would come to a halt. Prior to working at LSI, I had little knowledge of what a massive undertaking it is to run such a department for such a large company.
This internship gave me insight on IT at a very high level. It took a while for me to get used to the language that LSI used. Af first, many things flew over my head because this was my first real experience in this kind of environment. Throughout my 12 weeks I got to work on several different projects, and meet with a wide variety of people in the company. I would like to say that I was given the opportunity to build great relationships with some of my coworkers. I couldn’t be happier with the experience I was able to gain from LSI.