By Mitchell McBrairty
Kelley MBA Candidate, Class of 2021
As the summer comes to a close and classes are starting again, I connected with six 2nd year MBA students from the Plus Life Science Academy to learn more about their internship experience. Here is the first of two updates.
Geervani Koneti
Previous Industry, Employer, and Role:
Consulting/ Technology, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd, Scientist & Technical Lead
What company did you intern with this summer? Which program and/or functional area were you a part of?
I have interned at Direct Supply Inc (DSI) as Business Strategy Intern the summer of 2020. The project I was working on was a collaboration of Technology and TELS (building services) lines of business of DSI.
What project did you work on?
The project was focused on developing internet of things strategy for senior care facilities. We analyzed costs and benefits of monitoring senior care facilities from perspective of customer needs, regulations, technology and others to determine feasible experiments DSI needs to execute in short term. These short terms experiments would eventually determine a business case that would be valuable to customers ad DSI.
What was the biggest challenge you had to overcome, and what did you learn from it?
Due to the pandemic, my internship fully virtual. This has certainly limited our ability to have quick 5-minute conversations. Sometimes it was difficult to get time on someone’s calendar as the whole company was busy tackling the pandemic and seniors (DSI’s customers) were one of the worst affected and needed higher levels of care.
I had to proactively schedule meetings and ensure all the stakeholders agree with the project progress or approach. With my manager and other team members, I had scheduled recurring weekly meetings in the first few days of the internship. This ensured that I am meeting the people I need to and getting my answers even though sometimes the calls lasted way before the time.
How was your experience networking with different colleagues at your company?
DSI makes special efforts to expose interns to different lines of business. There were many sessions scheduled for us during the internship, giving us the overview of the business lines, project, regulations in senior living industry, leaders, etc. This has provided us a good opportunity to know and interact with people across the company. Apart from these sessions, we had multiple happy hours with all the executives and previous alumnae of the PGMTP program, which we were part of. We also had lunch meetings in which we had one on one interactions.
Every partner I interacted at DSI were passionate and excited to share their work. By the way, DSI calls their employees as partners as it is an employee owned company. This also meant that partners could discuss freely about their projects with every other partner of the firm. As a company DSI deliberately creates multiple opportunities to network across the company and introduced us to different set of people. Overall, it was a wonderful experience getting to know each partner.
Has this experience changed your overall career goals? Did you identify any particular skills that you would like to develop as you return back for the second year of the MBA program?
The experience has reinforced my decision to pursue a career at the interaction of technology and life sciences. Post my internship, one subject I would like to know better is healthcare regulation in the US.
Are there any other suggestions you would give to future students that are about to begin their summer internship?
Make sure you establish clear goals, define success and have a mini project plan for the summer and get buy-in for all of it from your manager or key stakeholders. Ask your manager inputs on a) whom to approach for different aspects/ information you might need during the summer b) how to interact with her/him c) key deliverables and other information as early as possible in the internship. Be as transparent as possible with your manager if you are facing any difficulties with getting information or finding time with a colleague.
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Nate Johnson
Previous Industry, Employer, and Role:
Healthcare, Indiana University Health, Treasury – Debt and Derivatives Analyst
What company did you intern with this summer? Which program and/or functional area were you a part of?
Merck & Co.; interned on the Corporate Treasury – Treasury FX team
What project did you work on?
Reassessed overall foreign hedging strategy and recommended changes based on impacts of spinoff in 2021.
What was the biggest challenge you had to overcome, and what did you learn from it?
The biggest challenge was coming into the internship and knowing little about foreign exchange hedging at a corporate level. It was a steep learning curve and involved a lot of mental gymnastics, but I went to work reading up and learning everything I could about our hedging program, which was hugely beneficial to learning about the company’s forecasting process and the different currency exposures.
How was your experience networking with different colleagues at your company?
It was fantastic! Everyone was so willing to chat about the culture and the personal career journey and even refer me to others in their network. By the end of my internship I was able to chat with 35 people at the company, mostly in finance but as well as Strategy and Marketing.
Has this experience changed your overall career goals? Did you identify any particular skills that you would like to develop as you return back for the second year of the MBA program?
It affirmed my desire to work within finance in the biopharmaceuticals space. I want to further develop my ability to manipulate and transform data for use in financial decision making. To that end, I am taking a few courses focused on data transformation.
Are there any other suggestions you would give to future students that are about to begin their summer internship?
My advice would be to learn as much about the company before going, beyond just public filings like 10K/Qs. Dig deeper and learn about the different groups within the company and really try to understand how they interact. If you are able to connect those dots it will be hugely beneficial in understanding how decisions are made and seeing the big picture.
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Jesse Pizarro
Previous Industry, Employer, and Role:
Government, Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS), Accountant
What company did you intern with this summer? Which program and/or functional area were you a part of?
Cigna Health. I was a Financial Development Program Summer Associate and I worked with the Global Health Benefits Team.
What project did you work on?
Project 1: Create an ROI model forecasting earnings from savings initiatives across different regions and improve accuracy of cost drivers.
Project 2: Standardize and Automate reconciliation process for Statutory Accounting
What was the biggest challenge you had to overcome, and what did you learn from it?
Biggest challenge this summer was getting buy-in from BFO’s of different regions to understand value that these saving initiatives were providing. Scheduled regular 1-1 with BFO to see what initiatives they were more focused on and increase analysis of those particular areas to open conversation further.
How was your experience networking with different colleagues at your company?
Everyone was very open and receptive to meeting with me. Almost everyone gave me liberty to schedule time on their schedule if it was open. While being in a virtual is not ideal for networking, Cigna made an active effort to make sure all employees were available to speak with us.
Has this experience changed your overall career goals? Did you identify any particular skills that you would like to develop as you return back for the second year of the MBA program?
This has definitely piqued my interest in Healthcare, and I will continue to look at other healthcare companies as potential FT jobs. An area that I would like to develop is my overall understanding of the Healthcare system. I was able to have a high-level understanding of how everything works but connecting the dots between all the different types would be helpful.
Are there any other suggestions you would give to future students that are about to begin their summer internship?
Overall recommendation; listen to the latest earnings calls, it gives you deep insight on how the company plans on pursuing the next period and with that information you will be able to adjust your project to meet those needs instead of waiting guidance from your manager. Additionally, having a base level understanding of the industry you’re going into will help you not have to learn it while doing the project itself.
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