Getting started with work....

As I reflect on my internship job seeking experience, I would like to stress again and again to prospective international students about coming to campus in fighting form in terms of learning how to network and developing a killer resume. 

Easy things first......if you got into business school, you already have what it takes to be a leader, you now need to develop a concise one page resume of your career, extracurricular achievements and leadership roles.....easier said than done....ONE PAGE!!....For most international applicants, a one page resume is not the norm.  Having lived in Australia, India and Nigeria, where you drive on the other side of the road, I know how difficult it is to create an effective one page resume. At my summer internship company, interns are expected to have up-to-date resumes on day one.

It is important to network during the internship as well....not only with prospective companies but also within prospective business lines at your current internship company. 

Networking within my internship company or your (going to be) company starts with defining your summer project in a manner that gives you maximum outreach possibilities. Summer projects are not very structured, most are fairly ambiguous and they involve working with cross-functional teams. It is important to set expectations with your supervisor, setting and planning regular meetings and getting contacts with the relevant teams upfront. Most companies will also ask you to get a few referrals at the end of your project and hence you need to continue networking within the organization.  Needless to say maintaining cordial relationships with one’s supervisor is critical to getting a job offer. Towards this, learn your bosses’ management style and adapt so that you seem amicable, approachable and friendly. Also, your work will most likely involve a presentation to management about your project’s achievements and so it would be a good start to brush up presentation skills upfront.

To conclude: networking, defining your summer project and maintaining an amicable and good relationship with your supervisor is critical to converting your internship into a full time job offer.

Finale

Hello everyone,

This is it! My 2 months summer internship is over now. Time does fly by.... I am sad that I have to say good bye to this great experience. However, during the internship, I had a great time with two other MBA interns. Even though each has different personality, we have overcome humps. Each member respects and listens the others. Most of all, we became great friends. I hope that this relationship lasts forever. I also had a great time with co-workers. I do really appreciate their helps and insights. I pray that our project result contributes to the company's future strategy. Here are some points that I want to go over.

1) Final presentation
We ended up having more than 150 pages of powerpoint slides. Well, we had to shrink those into 10 pages. We almost spent 2 entire days just for shrinking. After strenuous works, we finally had a presentation in front of entire strategy team. Even though our result was not super creative, it was solid enough to satisfy our audience. I do still remember their sharp questions. Trying to persuade others was not easy.

2) Final hang-out
About 15 MBA interns got together for the last farewell party. Everyone was tired but satisfied with their works and friendship, which we made during last 2 months. We reminisced from the day one of the internship orientation to the first farewell party for early leavers who had shorter projects. We also shared about favorite Korean foods and hated ones too. Good bye my friends!

3) Lessons
In-class learning is not going to work 100% in real work place. We needed to adjust what MBA has taught us mightily and, at the same time, to keep persuading co-workers. Yes, this was not a easy task, but this experience itself was another great learning opportunity.

Thank you very much for your reading! It is time to go home!! See you in AA!!

byung

2 more weeks to go!

Hi everyone. It has been already 6 weeks since I started the summer internship. Wow time does fly by~ Today I want to share how communication is important during the internship. The communication problem almost cost our project.

Since our project mentor had to take care of three other projects, we, three MBA interns, did not have real chance to talk to him for about two weeks. Yes, he was really busy and could not review our progress neither. Then problem occured. Our approach of project was not following the intension of our team leader, which he never mentioned before. A week before the interim report to team leader, our mentor noticed this issue and ordered us to redo the research in 4 days, which we have been doing for last two weeks.

Suddenly, we were under pressure. We decided to re-schedule the project and, painfully, shorten the project scope because we did not have enough time to complete the business proposal. To make the matter worse, we also had to complete extra report for the interim report: don't ask me why we have to write a report for a report. I guess that each team has its own working culture. Well, we did our best, and the interim report got a bad review by the team leader. But our team leader's frank opinion on the report greatly helped us to have clear understanding and picture of the project. His sharp comments helped us to build better framework, problem solving, and recommendation.

I am not blaming our mentor. It was our fault. We should have actively talked to the mentor, even though he was super busy. Helping him by not bothering him (no conversation) is not real help for both us and the mentor. Well, good news is that our project is heading right direction, and our team leader is fine with shortened project scope. We will see how our final presentation goes.

Hi guys,

My internship is almost over. Two more weeks to go!! Yes!! I didn't realize that time does fly by~ So far, the internship has been a blessing. 1) I made 30 new mba friends, who are from all over the world. 2) My team members are fun too hang out. 3) I totally forgot about Korean working culture. 4) Re-learning about the importance of the communication


1) Seoul Trip
One weekend, my fellow intern friend and I decided to take 8 international mba interns to Seoul. Well, they were sick and tired of Suwon, where is full of factories and not a fun place to hang out.
Even though, the end of the trip, we walked more than 6 hours, we were proud that we toured the most of the northern parts of Seoul. We stop by the loyal palace, the inner city stream, the president house, a traditional street, and the shopping mall. Let me know, if you interested.

2) Project members
The more and more I work with my teammates. I am falling in love with them : ) They are all smart people, and they are classic mba students. They know when to work and when to play. They know how to work efficiently. Hopefully, I learn most of their merits before the internship is over.

3) Korean working culture
I cannot not reveal about the internship. But one thing that I want to share about the culture is 'passive, passive, and passive!!' But it is better than when I was working in Korea.

4) Re-learning about the importance of the communication
Due to our project mentor's crazy schedule, of course super busy, we, mba interns, could not talk to him about a week. Well, to be honest, we felt bad to bother him. Due to this mis-communication, we ended up reworking on 2 weeks' worthy of marketing research in 3 days. Isn't this crazy??!! I guess that I got affected by 'passive, passive, and passive' Korean culture. Wake up! Byung!!

Talk to you guys later

byung

4th Post: Dell's Culture!

In this post I’d like to quickly talk about corporate cultures; in particular: Dell’s culture.

Dell’s culture is – I believe – quite unique. People here keep stressing ambiguity – and I think it’s important to understand just how much this culture is about being in a state of constant flux. For instance, as I mentioned in a previous post – the instructions I got when I got to Dell were: “This is the name of the product you are focusing on. This is a list of names. Talk to them. Figure it out.”; when I had mentioned this to other employees in the company they mostly chuckled and said “Welcome to Dell.”

The culture here is essentially one of taking initiative and knowing which resources can help you get the job done. Essentially, it’s an entrepreneurial culture in which you don’t have your hands held by your bosses. They don’t teach you to swim, they kick you screaming into the deep end, fully expecting you to either learn to swim or sink down to the bottom. I love it.

People who like to take initiative and set their own agenda can really blaze their own trail here. They can create new business lines from scratch, they can take the ball and run with it and people will not get in their way too often. This is something that I think truly distinguishes the corporate culture here from others. All too often in large corporations there is a certain entrenched thinking that is seldom challenged. I find Dell’s culture to be very accepting to critique and fresh thinking.

The deeper into the internship I get, the more productive I become, which is fortunate, because the work keeps piling on and on. Workdays quickly now become 10 hour-11 hour workdays, and I’m sure that as the date of my final presentation looms I will be racking up the over time like it’s nobody’s business.

Just Like MAP!

Hi people, how are you guys doing?

Even though I finished almost the half of the summer internship, I think it is good time to go back when my internship begun. By the way, so far, my internship has been fun and challenging, but, luckily, MAP experience has saved me couple of times. Thank God that I am in Ross : )

1. Internship Subject
I got the internship opportunity in the strategy team in Samsung Electronics' semiconductor memory division. My internship subject is setting a market entry strategy for an upcoming product by studying current IT trends. I want to go deeper, but it is against NDA sorry..

2. Team members
I'm working with two other MBA students. 'J' is from MBA school in China and has been a great intermediate between me and 'P'. And 'P', who has pure engineering backgrounds before joining MBA in U.S, has giving us diverse perspectives. It took me first two weeks to figure out the personalities of my teammates. I found out that we have a perfect chemistry for the project!!

3. First impression on mentor
My first impression on my mentor is very good. Considering conservative Korean culture, he is the person who has very open mind and will to listen other opinions, which are against his opinion. He is also love to talk about classic guitar, body building, and soccer. Finally, he is the one who makes us go home as early as possible. I love it!!

4. Just like MAP
Every internship step reminds me MAP; the letter of the engagement, the way interacting with mentor and other teammates, the research methodology, and, of course, making attractive also persuasive power point slides. I did not realize MAP experience was going to help me to secure my fulltime position. Cross ma fingers!!

See you next blog!

Dell - defining a project - and Austin - Blues central.

I'm 3 weeks into my internship. I was essentially given a list of names and was told : "go and talk to these people. Tell me what you think about the business."

The list had 25 names of people. These people had - possibly - 50 opinions. I wrote them all down. I brainstormed. I oohed. I ahhed. I wrote more stuff down. The 25 people suggested 25 more people I should talk to. Pretty soon I was living in other people's cubes.

I ran an IV line from Starbucks into my bloodstream.

At the end of the process - I think I have something that vaguely resembles a project proposal. I hope to finalize it in the beginning of next week and start working. I hope that my project's useful. A lot is riding on the recommendations. It seems like the project they assigned to me is actually going to be utilized as soon as possible - it gave me a sense of urgency I did not expect.

I do want to discuss two other things: One is Blues - Austin is known for it's very well developed blues music scene. I have decided to take advantage of that and use some of my spare time to relearn the guitar and harmonica. If you like music - seek employment with Dell.

The other is the experience of working in a large company that has so many MBA interns: It's pretty cool - a lot of likeminded people who are here in Austin as well - in a strange town. We end up socializing a lot and doing a lot of activities. For instance, today I went hiking in a park, and tomorrow I will go tubing. This despite the insane triple digit weather in the summers here.

If you have two opportunities for an internship - all other things being equal - pick the one where they have more interns. You'd have far more fun. So far we've gone out to concerts, boat trips, dinners, and more. An internship is more than the chance of getting a full time job; it's even more than the opportunity to learn new things you have not been exposed to before. And yet even more than a time to expand your professional network. It's a great time to make new friends.

Quarter one of internship

If the internship was equivalent to a company's financial year, this would be about time I would be reporting the Q1 performance. Yikes!!! what a scary thought. Three weeks...and no sign of the killer insights I'm supposed to deliver at the end of my internship. Three weeks and no economic value added. I'm sure my managerial accounting Prof. would be so disappointed.

However, over the past weeks I have been able to better formulate the questions that I'm seeking answers to and identify the people outside and inside the company who can help me answer them. Initially the problem to be solved didn't seem that difficult. I was confident that either the precision weaponry of Operations or mass destruction capability of corporate strategy would be enough to slay these demons. After all, how big can the problems of a small company be? But I guess the real complexity is in how and where to get the facts that define the problem.

The good thing about interning with an early stage company, I believe is that there is lot of room for contributing your own ideas. At the same time as there is little to no past data that you can base your decisions on, there is constant need to find information from outside sources. And if you are coming from a background where you have worked for large corporations in the past it takes a change of mindset to get used to the new way of getting things done. However, so far I have liked the freedom of being able to not only decide how to execute the project but also to decide the sources that I will use to come to the project conclusions.

So, I spent three weeks understanding the problem and may be formulating a vague strategy to solve it. Does that mean I added any value to the company? Wish there was a way to report that on a quarterly statement.
(325 words)

Hello!

My name is Chang Lee and I am a first year MBA student at the Ross School of Business. This summer, I am having my internship at Apple which was my top choice among all the high-tech companies. I am very excited and looking forward to meeting the people there.

I am planned to get involved in an operation project, and so far there seems to be several projects that I will be working on this summer but I don't know the exact scope of the project. I am planning to contact Apple to get to know about my project in more detail.

As a person who worked at Samsung as a business strategist, I am willing to get some business experience at a more global setting. Also, since Apple has been at the forefront of leading innovation through technology, I think my understanding in high-tech industry will increase after my internship. It is also important that I can work at the center of Silicon Valley with lots of high-tech companies such as Google, Cisco being there. I will meet various people from diverse background and function, and form a broad and deep relation with them.

One worry that I have is about the language since I only have business experience in Korea. But I am pretty sure that I will get over those problems well after having finished my MAP project at Microsoft.C

Taking the most out of it!

Hi all,

I would like to introduce myself. I'm Douglas Storf, a rising MBA2 and will be spending my summer at Amazon in Seattle where I'll be managing a product called S3 at the Amazon Web Services group. I'm really excited about the opportunity. One of my goals when I came Ross was to have an working experience with marketing at a High-tech company, preferably outside Brazil (my home country). I can say it is mission accomplished: not only I got a Marketing position at Amazon in Seattle, I only got a MAP project at Google in London!

After spending the last 6 weeks working and living in London, getting back to Ann Arbor had a contrasting impact on me: I'm happy to be back to where I now call home, but I know I'll miss Europe.

This week is the last week of the first year and is definitely a time for reflections. We are just getting ready for our internship experiences while our friends from the second year are getting ready for their full time experiences. "It will go fast" That is what I was told before coming to B-School. "It went too fast" That is what our MBA2 colleagues are saying now and I second their voice! I'm doing my best to take the most out of this experience but I find it inevitable to have a taste in my mouth that I am still missing a lot!

The internship is not going to be any different: it will go supper fast, I'll do my best to take the most out of it, I'll still get the feeling I'm leaving a lot behind! I guess I'm getting used to that!