the heart of NYC!

School just ended, seniors just graduated, and it felt so good to have a break after all the hard work last semester. Being a BBA junior also means that I will have to be interning this summer.I'm so excited about my internship opportunity in Goldman Sachs, Market Risks Management.

I'm not sure the exact divisions yet, maybe fixed income, maybe equity, maybe corporate, but I'm excited for all of them. I'll probably be looking at Bloomberg, excel sheets, and GS's own softwares to track stocks and equities and make analysis out of it. This is my first time working in New York, so I'm very nervous about it. I hope that I can be a contribution to the company, and I really wish to be able to learn and adapt really fast. Working from the 20th floor of the heart of New York city is going to awesome!

~Stacy Lim

(Indonesian)

France~I am coming!

Hi everyone, I am Jinuo Song, a third year BBA student from Shenyang, China. My emphasis in Ross is Finance and Accounting. This is my second year at Ross and I really enjoyed the time spent here. I learned a lot from the professors and also from my friends.

This summer, I will intern at Provisions. llc in Pontlevoy, central France which is co-joint with the Eur- Am Center (The European-American Center For International Education). The Eur-Am Center is charting pathways toward a global future. The Center was created in partnerships with outstanding universities and private-sector allies in the United States and Europe. I will be a Finance/Accounting Analyst this summer. My main responsibility is to document and analyzing all business transactions within the company. I am also responsible to detail assets, liabilities and capital to summarize current and projected company financial outlook, to coordinate the implementation and control of accounting procedures. More importantly, it will be a great way to learn French culture during the internship. I also have the opportunity to take some courses during the internship.

This will be a great opportunity for me because I can apply what I learned from the book to the real world. I learned French during high school and college. I am excited to improve my French level and also learn more about the French culture. At the same time, I am sure I will learn a lot from the fellow interns and have a great time in France this summer.

My first Strat 425 post...

So, I am an MBA who just finished his first year and will be spending the summer in Seattle, interning at Microsoft.

So far, I have limited information on my project, but I know I will be a Product Manager at the Windows Live business unit.

I hope this internship will help understand the High Tech industry and at the same time allow me to work in product development with tech engineers. The internship will give me the chance to work in a different environment with a widely different culture, hopefully giving me a better understanding of people.

I am really excited about spending the summer in Seattle, a city with so many options and things to do during the summer and being a part of one of the biggest Tech companies in the world which was also named one of the best places to work in the US. Working in developing a software product should be a great complement for my CPG experience.

I am a bit concerned about language problems especially keeping up with the speed with which some Americans talk and also getting used to the different way of doing things when working with different cultures.

But, no matter what... I am really looking forward to this opportunity!

Excited for summer!

Hello blog readers! I am Jofresh, a Filipina MBA student. Prior to attending business school, I worked in the finance department of Intel Corporation’s Philippines and Malaysia offices for almost six years. My concentration at Ross is still finance but I am also learning more about strategic consulting.

My first year at Ross has just ended. It has been an amazing year filled with meeting new friends, watching football games (Go Blue!), working on school projects, and (of course) recruiting. I am very excited for my summer internship. I am fortunate to have received a William Davidson Institute (WDI) Global Impact Internship/Fellowship. The WDI is a non-profit research and educational institute at the University of Michigan dedicated to understanding and promoting actionable business and public policies in emerging markets. I want to learn more about International Business and WDI gave me the opportunity to do just that.

I will be working this summer in BHUTAN! J

I will be working for Druk Holding & Investments (DHI), a government agency established through a Royal Charter issued by His Majesty the King of Bhutan. DHI holds and manages the commercial companies of the government, makes new investments, raises funds, and promotes private sector development in Bhutan. I will be analyzing and benchmarking costs then, ultimately, recommending cost strategies to the government-owned commercial companies.

I am very excited to see the beautiful country and learn more Bhutan’s culture. I heard from last year’s WDI fellow that people in Bhutan are very friendly and that the sights are amazing. I am also excited to work on a project that merges finance with consulting. I am thankful for the opportunity to enhance my skills. My internship starts on May 30. Wish me luck! If you have questions about Ross, just leave a comment and I would glad to help.

Cisco, here I come.

Oh, the MBA life. The past year went by so fast. After going through a recruiting frenzy, I am now about to reap the reward. This summer is shaping up to be a great experience.

I will be working at Cisco Systems Inc, under the Human Resources Leadership Program. Cisco does a great job of meeting each intern's learning objectives through a deliberate matching process owned by senior HR leaders. I am excited to be working on a project in a space that I specifically requested for - talent management.

Coming from an HR background, I am looking forward to seeing how my approach has changed after a year in the business school. It will be very interesting to see how my experience will translate into the challenges that I will be facing over the summer. The 12 week internship time frame makes the task of making an impact even more fulfilling. I'm sure that I will learn a lot from fellow interns and colleagues that I will be in close contact with.

It will be great to be in the bay area! There are a good number of Rossers who will be out there with me. So, the happy hours will not stop for sure!

Beginning of summer!

Hi all,

This is an introductory post. I am an MBA and this summer I will be interning at Ecolab in St Paul, Minneapolis! Ecolab is one of the few companies that recruits for business-to-business (B2B) marketing positions at Ross. I am in still in the midst of determining my internship scope, but I am excited to share that options include working for the Global Food and Beverage Division, to the Healthcare, Hospitality and Commercial Division - I am torn between a few really exciting projects but regardless of my final decision, I am certain this summer internship going to be an amazing experience.

Prior to Ross, I worked in the wealth management industry in Hong Kong and Singapore, as well as the non-profit industry in India. Coming to business school, one of my main goals was to do a career switch to B2B marketing. With the support of OCD and the Marketing Club, I successfully made the switch. This opportunity at Ecolab will give me the critical first-hand experience I need.

Speaking to friends who have worked or lived in Minneapolis, they all told me that summers in Minneapolis are beautiful. People in the city are very active in the summer and sports play a huge role.

I will be starting my internship in the first week of June, so till then!

artSFashion: a colombian perspective on San Francisco's arts, design and cultural activities

Hi All!

My name is Camila Salamanca, I am a first year MBA, I am from Colombia and I will do my internship in Taproot Foundation in San Francisco.

The Taproot Foundation is an organization that enables business professionals to donate their skills to help nonprofits with their marketing, human resources, strategy Management, among others. The idea behind this purpose is that most organizations tackling social problems don’t have access to the marketing, design, technology, management or strategic planning resources they need to succeed and that big corporations have. Without this talent, few are able to have their intended impact on critical issues like the environment, health and education. Thus, Taproot wants to provide them with access to those resources.

During my internship I will be a consultant for Taproot, helping them measure the impact they have had on the non-profits they have been helping so far.

With this internship, I expect to sharpen my business and strategic thinking and acquire useful skills for my future career as a consultant, but I also my leadership skills by having access to responsibilities that I might not have by working in larger organizations. Most importantly, by interacting and learning from new business leaders in the public private partnerships world I will expand my consulting experience to the non-profit sector in the US, which will allow me to build a wider network and help me understand and learn about successful public/partnership models used in the US that could be replicated later in a developing country setting.

I am nervous about really achieving my goals and provide a high quality work to the organization. Also, I will be working by myself in this project, so I am hopping I will still be able to have interaction with other members of the organization and receive as much support as possible.

I am very exited about learning new things, interacting and meeting new people, and contributing to a better society. But also, I am very exited about living in San Francisco. In fact, I will use my time and experiences in this city to write a blog on topics that are of great interest to me such as arts, culture and fashion. So, stay tuned, and wait to read in the next posts my Colombian perspective on artSFashion: a Colombian perspective on arts, design and culture in San Francisco!

Wrap-up and Final Presentatoin

Finally I have reached the end of my internship. This weekend, I am packing up all the things preparing to go back. In some sense, I miss Ann Arbor, but in others I miss Cupertino. Last Friday, I had a wrap-up meeting with my manager. Although my intern ends this coming week, since he is leaving for a business trip we had wrap-up a week before. I was told that overall my work was good. But Apple's recruiting system is not like other hi-tech companies, giving offer right at the end of internship. So I will have to wait for some time.


This week, I will have a final presentation on Thursday. I will report to my boss's boss boss, and some other staff related to my scope of work. On the same day, I will have another meeting set-up to expalin about my works so that someone here can follow-up those. Also, after all things are done, I am finally going to have a conference call with my boss to get feedback on my overall performance. I also have to give Apple a feedback about my intern experiences.


Overall, Apple's internship program seems to be very much organized, with diverse programs that interns can take advantage of. Although every people was busy, since I was assigned a manager and iBuddy, I could get as many information as I could, of course on the condition that I communicate with them in an efficient way. Besides work related stuff, there are lot's of extracurricular activities. Intern field trip to winery and SF baseball game, executive speaker series, department outing, meeting with senior managers and previous interns, lots of welcome/farewell parties and so on.
(Picture on right: Apple Corporate Games)

As a person having internship here, I am sure that future high-tech guys put Apple as their first priority intern place. You can work lots of smart Apple people, talk with them about their thoughts, sometimes see Steve Jobs at the cafeteria, sometime meet Woz and take picture with him, and also enjoy the beautiful weather at the west coast! Your experience here all depends on how you prepare and how you do at Apple!

Wrap up and final presentation

My last two weeks went by quickly as I wrapped up my workstream on the project and completed finishing touches to my deliverables. My work was focused on organization design for the client’s corporate communications department. I detailed out roles and responsibilities, assigned specific activities and helped the client identify hiring requirements. I realigned the reporting structure to enable greater focus on brand building and communication through the corporate website. I introduced the client to a methodical and rigorous approach to organization design and my framework became very popular with the management.

I feel satisfied with my contribution to the project. First, governance was a significant piece of the overall engagement and I had full ownership of developing the model. Second, I worked beyond scope to build frameworks for organization design, which led to the expansion of strategy consulting work. Finally, the governance model and organization design went through multiple discussions with the client and therefore was accepted for implementation. My mentor and buddy on the project played a great role in making this a success. His guidance and support throughout the summer gave me the confidence to go over and beyond my mandate.

The internship wrapped up with a 20-minute final presentation to the leadership of Strategy & Transformation (S&T) practice at IBM. It was great to see the immense variety of projects the interns had worked on. The leaders Saul Berman and Ron Frank provoked thought and articulated insights to build upon the work presented by the team. The final presentations added immense learning to my already rich summer.

Huge credits for making my summer so rewarding go to the lead MBA recruiter who got behind the nascent program with a great amount of personal commitment. With great persistence she influenced the leadership to staff us on the right projects, provide the necessary resources and participate in sessions. Most of all, she was warm and personable and wanted each of us to succeed. I look forward to working with her

The Final Countdown at Harley-Davidson

Three more days to go, and then I’m done with my internship at Harley-Davidson! I cannot believe that 10 weeks passed by so fast, and I’ll be headed back to Ann-Arbor in less than a week. It has been an incredible experience and I’ve learned so much. To all of you interested in general management, I’d highly recommend applying to Harley-Davidson’s Leadership Development Program (LDP) during your internship recruitment. It is probably one of the best rotational programs I have come across, and to add to that, the company is a great place to work in.

Well, I’m sure that a small part of why I am gushing so much about my internship experience is due to my visit to Sturgis, the largest annual motorcycle rally in the US. I am immensely grateful to my project sponsor for giving me the opportunity to go to the rally. It was probably the most memorable experience of my internship – the sight of all the die-hard motorcycling fans, and especially Harley-Davidson fans was quite something!

Harley-Davidson had a custom bike ride-in show at Sturgis, where bikers who had customized their bikes could ride in on their bikes and display them at our booth. Employees of Harley-Davidson then award the best bikes in various categories such as model families etc. It was fascinating to watch how much everyone there had personalized their bikes – and this gave me some good insights for my project, whose focus is to develop a long-term personalization strategy for Harley-Davidson. The picture here shows one of the customized bikes at the ride-in show.



The area around Sturgis is very scenic and most of the bikers who go to Sturgis go for a ride along Spearfish Canyon or to Mt. Rushmore. My project sponsor was kind enough to take me on his Road Glide Ultra for the most memorable ride of my life (so far!) along Spearfish Canyon. The winding roads and sights of streams and lakes on the way amidst lush green trees make for a very delightful experience. The picture here will illustrate what I am talking about.



All in all, this has been a challenging and rewarding internship experience. I really hope that I get to come back, but if not, it was still worthwhile as I learned so much. Again, I highly recommended the program for everyone interested in general management and for all you Harley-Davidson enthusiasts out there. Ride safely!

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

What I didn’t do

(MBA, Amazon)

These days I was discussing with another Rosser what was the most valuable point of the internship. In doing so I had to go through an exercise of exploring all the positive points and picking only one. This is unfair with the other points but is a good exercise. Among the positive points I can highlight the city, the group of interns, the learning and the company itself. I have already mentioned the first couple points on a previous post so I’ll focus on the company and the main point.

It is very exciting to be part of a company that is making history. Amazon has now over $25bi in annual revenues and is still growing at over 40% a year. Not many other companies, if any, have done the same. It is definitely changing the face of the Retail. And being part of this transformation is an invaluable opportunity. There is yet a more propounding transformation Amazon is causing: the way we transfer knowledge, through e-books.

But among all, I believe that the most valuable point of my internship is this bad taste I now have in my mouth. I have now this inquietude for knowing what impact I’m going to cause in the world. Recently, I have seen the speech Jeff Bezos delivered to Princeton graduates . I learned a little bit more about his trajectory and I was profoundly uncomfortable to learn he started Amazon when he was 30. He speaks about choices and leaves us to think about what choices are we making. Jeff was able to able to impact the world twice (the face of retail and the e-books revolution) and who dares to doubt he could do it again?

If I can point out only one positive aspect of my internship, it’s definitely going to be the uneasiness I am left with. Yes, I have made new friends, yes I have enjoyed the city, yes I have learned a lot. All of this is very valid. But the best of all is what I haven’t done… yet!

Dress for Success

In one of my past posts I talked about the importance of dressing for the job you want. In this video I talk about dress in the office and how to tie 2 different types of ties. Feel free to email me with any questions about how to dress in the office.

Also the music is a little louder than I wanted but the song is "Words of Wisdom" by Hoodie Allen. He is the first artist I managed when I started my business Invite Only Management, LLC, and he is really starting to get popular so make sure to check out his music.

Winding Down!

Its amazing fast the summer program's gone that I can’t believe it’s all coming to an end this week. I presented my summer project to a team of hard core bankers and got very good reviews. Seems they were impressed by my understanding of the strategic rationale of the deal I analyzed (I wonder why I didn't take up the Corp Strategy offer I got instead, maybe I’d have aced it). At this stage in the program, the vast majority of my fellow interns are obsessed over who'd be receiving an offer from which group. Funny how your perspectives change: I have finally realized that contrary to my enthusiastic first post in this blog, I don't want to spend the next four years building models and prepping presentations in the concrete jungle that is NY. So much for mastering the universe - I'm now quite relaxed and taking things in my stride and trying to savor these last days. I spent a good chunk of last week networking with various people here at, including having an hour-long debate with a Managing Director on the merits and demerits of Obamacare (aka healthcare reform bill). Of course I was the unyielding liberal while he played the role of the rational free market advocate.

I'll be having my end of period review on Wednesday and I look forward to receiving all the superlative comments on my performance on the second half (yeah right). However the real treat would be the freedom to explore NY for a few days afterwards and hopping on a plane to Atlanta with a couple of friends before deciding whether to go back to AA for more learning (just kidding).

Let me closeout my participation in this blog by offering some tidbits of advice to incoming MBAs: if you do find yourself in a generalist Investment Banking summer internship program, bond quickly with the very first group you work with, be flexible in your group preferences (I was not, for personal reasons) and spend a boatload of time with as many people in your group as you can. May the force be with you!

P.S. Kindly forgive any typos you see in this post..... I'm typing on my iPhone keyboard and needless to say, my thumbs are quite arthritic now.

How to do a Good Internship?

Again, time flew and I have only three weeks left until the end of my internship. Most of my projects are now at the final stage. There were several things that went on well, but also several others that I feel more could have been done. All these will be an asset for me in preparing for my full time job search. I also got some feedback after my seventh week, which was really a valuable one. Here are some of my recommendations while doing internship.

First, before coming for the internship it would help very much if you have a high-level plan of what you will do during internship. For example, you can plan some networking lunches with people at Apple or even some other people at bay area high-tech companies. You can also plan to write an intern diary to track what/how you are doing to improve yourself every week. As for me, I memorized some things that I should do or shouldn't do, but I didn't write a daily intern diary. But I guess when you write one it will definitely help you.

Second, try to understand the industry so that you can communicate well throughout doing your project. Although you are working for specific company, while doing work your knowledge on the industry helps dealing with other employees at the company. They will know that you are prepared and passionate about what you are doing at work.

Third, as a perspective of balancing your work and life, I suggest you plan to enjoy your weekend. Sometimes, intern life can make you get stressed a lot. Especially for me who is an international student, I was stressed while communicating since I am not a native speaker. Especially for international students, conference call seems to be the hardest communication you have to overcome to communicate well in a US company.

Anyway I hope good luck to all of the interns!