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Even in today’s changed world, America’s
top corporations and high-tech companies are
actively recruiting new grads. Minority college
students with IT skills may get the call even
before graduation. And everyone agrees that
there’s no better way for companies and
their prospective employees to become acquainted
than through internships and co-ops.
Besides good grades, worthwhile work experience
rings bells with recruiters. And if your intern
slot suits you and the company both, you won’t
ever have to wonder what your post-college
workplace will be like. On your first day
on the job you’ll be back home.
In organizations as disparate as Peoplesoft,
Convergys, Unisys and the National Security
Agency, the message from hiring executives
is the same. “We see our interns and
co-op students as likely full-time employees.
We are actively seeking minority candidates
and striving to diversify our workforce. We
want our interns and co-ops to be doing work
they like.”
IT: a good investment
If you’ve chosen an IT-related major,
you’ve made a good investment. IT skills
are always needed, even by companies that
have experienced significant workforce reductions.
That’s because IT cuts across every area
of a company’s business, from internal
document flow and e-mail to customer service
and purchasing.
So what’s it like to be an intern
in IT? What kind of work do you do? Should
you hope to segue on to full-time employment?
We’ve collected answers to those questions
from interns and former interns working in
IT at a dozen companies.
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| “Interning showed me how to thrive
in a corporate system,” says P&G’s
Steven Letts. |
P&G’s Steven Letts:
“a handle on how to thrive”
“I’m having big fun here,”
says University of Cincinnati senior Steven
Letts, a co-op student at Procter & Gamble
(P&G, Cincinnati, OH). Letts is majoring
in business IS. He began at P&G as an
intern in 1999, working in the Fabric and
Home Care R&D area. Since then he’s
worked alternate quarters as a co-op. Last
summer he was on the SAP team, implementing
systems in contract manufacturing.
“It’s given me a better handle
on how to thrive and function in a corporate
system,” says Letts. “When I first
came I was surprised there was such a big
push for teamwork. I had to work with other
people to get the information I needed. You’ve
got to spend a lot of time talking with co-workers
and teammates.”
Will Yee of P&G:
“The opportunities are boundless”
Will Yee is Asian American and Letts’
classmate at Cincinnati. He’ll graduate
in June with four semesters of co-op experience.
He spent his time providing in-house helpdesk
support to IT end users. “You never feel
trapped here,” he says. “The opportunities
are boundless.”
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| Andre Da Breau finds Goldman Sachs is
a comfortable place for people of color.
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Andre Da Breau: intern to employee
at Goldman Sachs
Andre Da Breau grew up in Trinidad and went
on to be a CS major at historically black
Morehouse College (Atlanta, GA). He admits
he had never heard of Goldman Sachs (New York,
NY) when a friend convinced him to go along
for an on-
campus interview.
Now a full-time employee after a summer
internship in 1998, Da Breau says Goldman
Sachs is a comfortable place for people of
color. In fact, he notes a burgeoning Morehouse
presence at many Wall Street firms.
Da Breau had already worked as an on-campus
researcher for NASA’s Goddard, Space
Flight Center (Greenbelt, MD). Goldman, however,
put him to work in the enterprise technology
area, polishing telecom apps prior to an inhouse
rollout. Da Breau thought this was fine. “I
knew going in,” he says, “that rather
than research, I wanted to focus on technology.”
He’s seeing plenty of that in the
firm’s Custody Technology department,
as an associate developer providing services
to high-net-worth customers of the firm. He
has embraced the investment banking world
and plans to start an MBA in finance at New
York University – paid for by Goldman
Sachs.
“I had not envisioned myself at a
financial institution,” Da Breau says.
“I thought it would be so hectic here
that people wouldn’t have time for you.
But that was not the case at all. I’ve
learned a lot through informal discussion.”
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| Dana Moore was enthusiastic about her
job at Goldman Sachs. |
Dana Moore of Goldman Sachs:
summer in the city
Dana Moore, a North Carolina A&T senior
in CS, also learned about Goldman Sachs from
on-campus recruiters. She was enthu-siastic
about spending the summer in New York City.
And she liked the company’s internship
approach and the training program it offers
in development, systems and programming.
Moore spent her first intern summer designing
programs for a software development group
that was upgrading e-mail capabilities, programming
regional office storage systems and creating
a GUI. Her second summer focused on system
admin, standardizing files among merging departments.
“I’ve really appreciated the
way Goldman’s internship is structured,
from orientation to paperwork to team building
and presentations by top management,”
she says. She found out that it’s a good
idea to network, “so if you want to move
to another department you’ll know the
people to contact.”
She learned a lot about the financial world.
And the many activities and gatherings planned
for interns and new hires were good, too.
Another thing that Moore gained at Goldman
was a better understanding of what she doesn’t
want to do. “My first summer let me know
I wasn’t interested in software development,
so I took a networking course that steered
me toward the system admin job.”
Well-prepared minority students like Moore
are eagerly sought by Goldman, says Stephanie
McMillan, IT college recruiter. “We put
them to work as developers, systems professionals
and telecom analysts.
“Once they’ve successfully interned
we know they’ve got the skill sets, aptitude
and personality to be a good fit here. That
helps us decide whether to extend an offer
of full-time employment.”
Rod Gray at FedEx
At Federal Express (FedEx, Memphis, TN), Northwestern
University senior Rod Gray, who is African
American, has gained valuable experience for
two summers. First he was assigned to the
company’s Internet security department,
working on and testing software to improve
authentication for FedEx users. Then he moved
on to customer business solutions, which made
him think he might like to pursue strategic
planning and consulting after graduation.
“My internship experience has opened
my eyes to the wide world,” Gray says
with enthusiasm. “It has enhanced my
communication skills, planning and teamwork.”
IT recruiter John Wallis says FedEx continues
to actively recruit minority interns and co-ops.
Wallis offers a list of after-work activities
FedEx puts on for its students, ranging from
facility tours to the local Triple A baseball
games. Most students work in Memphis but some
are hired at other FedEx locations nationwide.
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| Vinh Vu’s manager at John Deere shifted
him to work on NT and Unix servers.
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At John Deere, Vinh Vu
works in Web development
Interns at John Deere (Moline, IL) get to
visit golf championships sponsored by the
company, rather than baseball games. “While
it’s true we’re a manufacturer of
machinery and not rockets, we still need high-tech
skills to support our work,” says Deere’s
MaryLinda Coward, division manager for info
systems HR. Interns do project work that exposes
them to areas like application development,
security, telecom, server admin and Web design.
University of Illinois senior Vinh Vu,
a CS and engineering major, has spent two
summers at Deere. He started out on IBM mainframe
and data migration software. Halfway through
the internship his manager realized that Vu
had more technical expertise than expected
and shifted him to work on NT and Unix servers.
“I had to learn a lot of new languages,
and I hadn’t worked with so many people
before,” Vu says. “I spent as much
time walking around the department talking
to people about the work as I did sitting
in front of a computer.”
The next summer Vu was a Java programmer,
working on Web development in the parts marketing
department. “The technical side was more
familiar and related to what I was doing in
school,” he says.
“Deere does an excellent job of making
even summer employees feel like part of the
company. I also liked working with people
of different ages, genders and races. The
best part of my intern experience was the
people I worked with.”
Arun Francis: testing and
setup at Peoplesoft
Peoplesoft (Pleasanton, CA) rotates interns
in and out of jobs year-round, says university
relations recruiter Lindsay Savage. There
are generally openings for interns in Pleasanton
and other offices, and student workers are
frequently hired full-time.
Arun Francis, who is working toward a BA
in Web design at Las Positas College (Livermore,
CA), started at Peoplesoft in September 2000
after getting his AA in computer technology
from nearby Heald Institute. Francis’
family is Asian Indian. He came to the U.S.
from Barcelona, Spain as a child, and grew
up in South San Francisco.
Francis works in an eight-person lab at
Peoplesoft, testing Peopletools, setting up
application servers and process schedulers,
and establishing specific environments for
certain tests. It’s not Web design, but
“Any technical knowledge will help me
in the future,” he says.
“It’s been an education to see
the pressure-packed atmosphere and how the
company has to meet deadlines. Sometimes it’s
mellow for a while, then all of a sudden things
get moving.”
Stanley Jones: cutting edge
at Microsoft
Intern Stanley Jones, an African American
and a junior in CS at the University of Southern
California, finds things pretty hectic at
Microsoft (Redmond, WA). “I’ve learned
that this is a fast-paced industry. I’ve
seen that it takes a lot of self-motivation
to get ahead. If you do only what is expected
of you, you won’t get very far.
“My first summer I worked on MS Publisher,
an off-the-shelf product for desktop publishing.
I finally got to see what goes on behind the
scenes in MS Office apps like Word and Excel.
“My second summer I worked on Site
Manager, a service small businesses use to
build and maintain their own websites. This
opened a door for me with SQL and ASP. I learned
a lot about servers and system architecture
– cutting-edge material I didn’t
get at school.”
Interns at Microsoft are assigned to various
technical teams, as Jones was. They work with
developers, testers and program managers on
actual products shipped to customers.
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| Microsoft’s Juan Perez: “an
in-depth understanding of each area.” |
Microsoft’s Juan Perez:
a crazy pace
Software design engineer Juan Perez grew up
in Brooklyn, NY, but his family originated
in Uruguay. He interned at Microsoft in 1997
and ‘98, and became a full-time employee
after he graduated from the University of
Florida (Gainesville, FL) in 1999. “I’m
still learning at a crazy pace,” he says.
He spent his summers working as a tester
for Microsoft Frontpage 98, and the Windows
CE operating system for Sega Dreamcast. Testing,
he says, gave him “an extremely in-depth
understanding of each area.”
Amber Jackson:
proving herself
at Convergys
Intern Amber Jackson feels very much at home
at Convergys (Cincinnati, OH). A junior at
Northern Kentucky University (Highland Heights,
KY), Jackson continued to work at Convergys
part time after completing her summer 2001
stint.
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| Convergys’ Amber Jackson was inspired
to take more programming languages.
|
She enjoys her work in the billing group,
which draws on both her math and CS majors.
“It’s making me want to take more
programming languages even though my degree
doesn’t require it.
“Convergys gives you a chance to prove
yourself, let you show who you are and what
you’re capable of,” she adds. “It
also gives you an opportunity to move around
the company.”
Tre Clark, senior associate for recruiting
and himself a former intern, says that “As
long as interns do well, they will be offered
spots at the end of their senior year.”
Venay Mehta, tech ops VP
at Convergys
Venay Mehta, who is now VP of Sprint CS technical
operations at Convergys, started as an intern
ten years ago. He had just arrived from India
to study at Cincinnati’s Xavier University.
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| Convergys VP Venay Mehta manages 400 development
people. He started at the company as an
intern ten years ago. |
His internship, he says, “gave me
a tremendous leg up in understanding how business
really works. At school you read about the
formal structure of the software development
cycle, but when you come to work you realize
customers don’t always give you all the
requirements when you need them.”
Mehta manages 400 people who generate about
half a million hours of development a year.
“This is the largest commercial client/server
billing system in the cell phone and wireless
industry for the systems we operate,”
he says.
Mehta notes that Convergys has “a
career path that allows upward mobility through
the corporation as a technologist. If your
forte is programming or you’re an Oracle
guru, you don’t need to deviate to get
career advancement.”
Melissa Shaffer: on the
Mayo support team
Melissa Shaffer joined the Mayo Clinic (Rochester,
MN) full time after interning after her senior
year. She received a bachelors in CS and graphic
design at Morningside College (Sioux City,
IA) in 2000. As an intern she helped to maintain
data, working with software that monitors
patients’ vital signs for reference by
the medical staff.
“Mayo is a huge place, but I found
myself working on a team of five or six people,
making the work experience very personal,”
Shaffer says. She also enjoyed the regular
intern gatherings, where she learned what
was going on around the organization.
She now works on a general support team,
handling things like foundation donations
and access control.
At Mayo, Pamela Riggs
learned what she loved
Pamela Riggs, an EE grad from Arizona State
University (Tempe, AZ), was recommended to
Mayo by a professor. She interned there for
a summer and a winter semester and is working
as a full-time employee before going back
to grad school in the spring.
Riggs worked with Mayo’s computer
infrastructure. She loved the Mayo environment
and supportive people, but Riggs is a Navajo,
and found that Minnesota was just too far
from her home in Arizona. She also realized
that what she really wanted to do was continue
her education and go into research.
Camilla Nelson works with
Pices Chart at Mayo
Camilla Nelson is a native of Duluth, MN,
where she graduated from St. Scholastica College
with degrees in health information management
and CIS. For her, Mayo’s location is
one of the many things she loves about her
job there.
As a summer intern in 2000, Nelson did
Web page development and some Unix scripts.
Now, as a permanent programmer/analyst, she’s
working with Pices Chart, a patient information
application.
“I like knowing that what I’m
working on matters to the people who use it.
They get mad if something doesn’t work,”
Nelson says. “That’s actually a
good feeling.”
Steven Odhiambo:
perfect fit at Unisys
When he was a math major at the University
of Nairobi, Kenya, Steven Odhiambo spent a
year with a Nairobi insurance agency. Then
he came to Barry University (Miami, FL) to
pursue his MBA in MIS. “Everyone around
the world knows that if you want to work with
computers, you come to the States,” he
says.
In his first year at Barry, Odhiambo found
Unisys (Blue Bell, PA) on the Internet and
applied for an internship. It was a perfect
fit, since he’d been working on the same
Internet groupware that Unisys was in the
process of installing.
“I learned the basic principles of
software development, and I learned that cyber
organizations can be very large,” he
reflects. When he got his MBA and returned
to the company full-time he opted for data
warehousing. He’s working for the same
manager who oversaw his previous work group.
Some day Odhiambo hopes to take his experience
back home to Kenya. In the meantime, he’s
happily settled in an area he knows well.
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| Unisys intern Chibale Wills has the goal
of opening an IT center to teach children.
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Chibale Wills: sampling
the corporate world
Unisys isn’t very far from Chibale Wills’
home in Washington, D.C. But he acknowledges
that working in the corporate world meant
“going outside my comfort zone.”
Wills graduated from Morehouse College
(Atlanta, GA) in 1998 with a degree in business
management. He went on to an MBA program at
Howard, spending the summers working at Unisys.
His special project was In-Room Connect, which
puts technology into hotel rooms.
He started in IT at Howard, but decided
to concentrate on finance. His personal goal
is to open an IT center in inner-city Washington
to assess how children learn, and then teach
them. “I’ve seen the need created
by the digital divide,” he says.
Dan Guaglianone, VP of worldwide recruiting,
points out that interns can do some studying
via the online Unisys University. They can
pick technical courses and backup skills like
organizational behavior, time management and
successful listening. “It’s a great
resource,” says Guaglianone, and many
interns are taking advantage of it.
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| “At Walgreens I learned a lot that
isn’t taught in school,” says
Melissa Gobin. |
Melissa Gobin: learning
about Walgreens
All Melissa Gobin knew about Walgreens (Deerfield,
IL) when she landed an internship there was
what any other shopper might know about the
drugstore chain. “I was thinking stores,
not systems,” she admits now.
Gobin, whose family is from Guayana, is
a joint biology and CS major at Loyola University
(Chicago, IL). She had already done an internship
based on biology, so she was eager to get
into IT when she spent the summer of 2001
at Walgreens. She worked in the healthcare
systems area, coding and testing Intercom
Plus, a system used in Walgreens pharmacies.
“At Walgreens I had to learn a whole
lot that would never be taught in school,
but theory from school can still be applied,”
she says.
Gobin is an Inroads intern. She found the
variety of training and information sessions
sponsored by both her employer and the Inroads
organization immensely helpful. She also praises
Walgreens’ efforts to keep employees
informed. “I get a sense they really
care about the people who work there.”
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| Some interns at the National Security
Agency do their classified work in Building
128. |
NSA: finding high-tech work
At the National Security Agency (Fort Meade,
MD), “Our employees, including our interns,
are here to protect American lives and handle
the nation’s secrets. We make no apologies
that you’ve got to go through a stringent
background check and full-scope polygraph,”
says chief of recruitment Harvey Davis.
Clearance takes a while, but the agency
often extends same-day conditional offers
at college job fairs. And once they’ve
obtained clearance, interns do the same confidential
mission work that’s given to full-time
employees.
CS students are typically assigned to object-oriented
methodology, multimedia, data warehousing
or mining, design, analysis and development
of software and systems, client/server development
and Web technology.
“There’s interesting, strong
work that can be done here,” says Davis.
“NSA is a great first job for anybody.
If you worked here for five years, you’d
be very marketable.”
Because NSA’s mission work is classified,
Diversity/Careers was introduced to “Joe,”
a Puerto Rican intern, only by his first name.
Joe says he went to NSA “because I was
looking for someplace where I’d be in
touch with the latest technical expertise.
And I certainly found it.”
TRW’s LaTricia Watson:
“a little bit ahead”
At TRW Systems (Greenbelt, MD), University
of Maryland-Baltimore County grad LaTricia
Watson began work in the summer of 1996. She
became full-time in May 1999.
Her first assignment focused on requirement
analysis and a little code analysis. That
exposure got her interested in databases,
and that’s where she’s focusing
now. One of the best things about TRW, she
says, is that “They’ve allowed me
to do so many different things.”
Watson feels her Inroads and work experiences
really helped her in school. “I’m
a hands-on learner,” she says. “So
I went back feeling I had a better understanding
of the overall process. I was a little bit
ahead of other students.”
Their advice to you
These interns had experiences ranging from
very good to great. To be sure your internships
are just as satisfying, here is some advice
from the people we interviewed:
• Get as much information as you can
about the kind of work you’ll be doing.
Don’t be afraid to call your hiring manager
to ask.
• Recognize that theory and hands-on
applications are different. Approach your
job as another learning experience. Once on
the job, be willing to ask for help, and remember
that teamwork is part of the corporate environment.
• Don’t be afraid of working for
a big company. Chances are you’ll be
working on a comfortable level.
• Open up to the people around you. Network;
learn from your mentor.
• You’ll need to learn the company’s
lingo and buzzwords. After a few weeks you’ll
be speaking like a native.
• Don’t be put off by a distant
location. Nothing is forever, and you’ll
learn new things by being in a new place.
• Take advantage of the educational opportunities
the company offers. Get all you can from the
experience while you’re there.
And when you’re hired full-time, at
the company where you interned or another,
don’t forget to help the interns and
co-ops who come along after you. An open-door
policy and friendly manner might not be in
your job description, but you’ll probably
find it pays off in many ways.
D/C
Lisa Furlong is a freelance writer and
editor in Center Harbor, NH.
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