Interviews by Mitchell McBrairty
MBA Candidate, Class of 2021
Anna Hung
Previous Industry, Employer, and Role:
Before my MBA I worked in marketing operations for magAssist, a startup developing an extracorporeal artificial heart.
Where did you intern with this summer? Which program and/or functional area were you a part of?
Novartis; I interned in Market Access for the Patient & Specialty Services team.
What project did you work on?
My project focused on analyzing partner vendors and optimizing performance management.
What was the biggest challenge you had to overcome, and what did you learn from it?
In a virtual environment, I was afraid it would be hard to join a new team and share my opinions. However, at Novartis, the organization embraces the “unboss” culture,
encourages everyone on the team to share their own opinions and take initiative. This gave me the chance to practice presenting my viewpoints and train my presenting skills.
How was your experience networking with different colleagues at your company?
People are really nice and willing to share their experiences. Novartis has such a talented team. I learned a lot from them every single day when I interned in Novartis.
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?
Interning at Novartis opened the door to a new world in Patient & Specialty Services and gave me a great experience with the pharmaceutical industry. In pharma, I had the chance to stay close to the patients and trying our best to improve the patient’s journey. We are in the role that allowed our patients and healthcare professionals to be able to access the product and understand it better.
Are there any other suggestions you would give to future students that are about to begin their summer internship?
Not be afraid to ask questions so that you can quickly adjust to the new environment, especially in a virtual situation. It is also important to network as much as possible so that you can learn about the company’s culture and understand the different functions within the company and learn how we work better in a team.
Robert Kobey
Previous Industry, Employer, and Role:
Automotive Sales, Community Auto Group, Internet Sales Manager
Where did you intern with this summer? Which program and/or functional area were you a part of?
CarDon & Associates (operates senior care facilities in Indiana and Ohio). Internship in analytics and finance.
What project did you work on?
Worked on cost allocation at the individual patient level to measure patient profitability, automated the analysis in Power Query and Power Pivot and integrated data from multiple information systems.
What was the biggest challenge you had to overcome, and what did you learn from it?
There were a lot of challenges: doing an internship in the middle of a pandemic at a healthcare company, learning enough to understand a business with a lot of financial complexity, and technical challenges to create a tool that is easy to update with new data each month. If I had to pick one, I would say the technical challenges were the most difficult. In the process, I learned a lot about using automation to do things that wouldn’t be feasible to do manually.
How was your experience networking with different colleagues at your company?
It was very difficult with everything going on with covid. It is difficult to make those personal connections when you aren’t face-to-face.
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?
I now have a much greater appreciation for the importance of analytics and the insights you can get when you have the tools to work with large data sets. I haven’t changed my career goals, but I plan to sharpen my analytics skills during the school year as a result of this internship.
Are there any other suggestions you would give to future students that are about to begin their summer internship?
One of the things that really helped me during my internship was to reach out to faculty and other students with expertise in the areas where I was struggling during my internship. They were very helpful in pointing me in the right direction and towards the right resources.
Matt Lee
Previous Industry, Employer, and Role:
Consumer Products, 3M, eCommerce Sales Specialist
Where did you intern with this summer? Which program and/or functional area were you a part of?
Medtronic, Business Marketing Academy
What project did you work on?
This summer I worked on a project to increase visibility and tracking capabilities for Medtronic marketing spend. I created a tool that would help product marketers make more accurate plans on how they would spend their marketing dollars at the beginning of the year and to track that spend throughout the year. Ultimately the goal is to increase to use this information to increase the return on marketing spend for the company.
What was the biggest challenge you had to overcome, and what did you learn from it?
I had never worked in a finance centric role before. My project required understanding several different budgeting processes and systems that tracked marketing spend. I had to understand how marketing spend was flowing through a handful of systems as well as how that spend was currently being gathered and analyzed by financial personnel
Overall, I learned how to ask questions well and to continually follow up and search for better resources. Many times the first person I contacted wasn’t the right person with the answers, but I could use that connection to find the person that did.
How was your experience networking with different colleagues at your company?
I had a very easy time networking within Medtronic. The company culture is extremely collaborative and almost all of the people I reached out to were willing to make time to connect. Several times I had to reach out to members at the VP level and was always given the time of day to ask questions. It was also very easy to network with individuals in my peer group. There were 21 other marketing interns in my program and all who I reached out to were able to meet.
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 experience changed my outlook on the finance function within a large corporation. I realized that financial literacy was a very valuable skill to have and would open many doors into leadership if I would be able to better understand and articulate financial metrics. I decided to tack on two additional finance courses this semester as a result of what I was exposed to during my internship.
Are there any other suggestions you would give to future students that are about to begin their summer internship?
Dive in. 10-12 weeks seems like a while to get your feet wet but ultimately it is a spring to the finish. Just as you’re getting a hang of what you are doing you will have a midpoint report out and be expected to have a full project plan of what you have accomplished and what you will accomplish. Exercise your best organizational skills. You will be consuming a lot of information in a short window of time and you will need to quickly reference and syndicate that information. Keep an evolving list of you have met with and where they reside within the organization. Include notes that will help you remember specific details about colleagues lives to help build report. Most of all. Ask questions. You are in the internship to learn as much as you can about this company. Questions show that you are interested in what you are doing and engaging with the work. If you are afraid to sound stupid, your worries are misplaced. You will look way dumber if you make an assumption that turns out to be wrong. Be humble, flexible and work hard and the rest should take care of itself.
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