Tag: internships

Various Olin students contributed to this post.

Earlier this summer, we shared the stories of six MBA ’22 students and how their Olin education set up them up for success. Today, we’re back with three MBA ’22 students and one BSBA ’22 student. Whether they’re working in marketing, finance or logistics, the foundational skills they learned at Olin have prepared them for the job ahead.

How did your Olin education prepare you for your internship?

“At Schnucks, I work with the Communications team. Our team has a hand in every single department and the dissemination of information both internally and externally. Coming from a background in journalism, Olin offers me many brand-new learning opportunities. Within my internship, I’m enjoying building on the solid foundation of the FTMBA program. Having the first-year core classes at Olin has prepared me to communicate and strategize more effectively with departments such as Accounting, Finance, Merchandising and Operations at Schnucks and become a more well-rounded businesswoman.”

-Lucy Reis, MBA ’22, communications intern at Schnuck Markets

“I use Olin’s’ value-based and data-driven approaches every day of my internship. At Amazon I’m encouraged to dig deep into data sets to gather insights and invent new creative solutions to solve customers’ problems. Olin’s education prepared me for my internship at Amazon by teaching me qualitative and quantitative analysis frameworks that allow me to deconstruct and analyze business problems in an organized manner. In my current role, I’m using the managerial insights I mainly learned in my operations and strategy courses. [They] allow me to complete my work and to communicate effectively with high-ranking, experienced technical and nontechnical professionals with over 20 years of experience that are even outside of my own area of expertise.”

-Antonio Rivera-Martínez, MBA ’22, senior manager program intern at Amazon

How/what are you taking what you learned at Olin and applying it to your current role?

“The most valuable thing I have applied from my time at Olin to my current role is communication and teamwork. Olin’s curriculum emphasizes team projects, which simulate real work environments that cultivate problem solving and concise communication. Throughout my time at Olin, I’ve had the opportunity to work with different teams, either in extracurriculars or classes. I come out of each team project learning more about working with different people with diverse backgrounds to achieve the best outcome.”

-Daphne Liu, BSBA ’22, business analyst intern at McKinsey & Company

“Building a competitive and marketing strategy with a unique value proposition for a product, building relationships with different stakeholders, and understanding customer problems first and then providing them a solution are some of the things which I learned and apply in my current role.”

-Vaibhav Dabas, MBA ’22, product manager intern at VMWare

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Part of a series about summer internships from Olin MBA ’20 students. Today we hear from Claudia Otis, who worked at Microsoft as a finance intern.

How did I prepare for my interview/land the internship?

I applied to the finance position at Microsoft through Prospanica’s job portal. Shortly after, I got an email saying that they wanted to interview me at the career fair.

I researched the company and the cultural change it was undergoing since Satya Nadella became CEO.

I prepared behavioral and technical questions. For example, the reasons why I wanted to work in tech and at Microsoft after working in investment banking.

After I passed the first round, Microsoft called me for the on-site interview. I prepared by doing mock interviews with my career coach at the WCC and with another classmate who was also going to the final interview.

Once the day of the final interview arrived, I just tried to be myself, relate to people and be confident about my preparation. I was so happy when I got the email saying I got the position!

How I am using what I have learned at Olin during my internship?

At Olin, I improved my networking skills, which helped me during my internship to interact with different teams and people, expanding my network within Microsoft.

Thanks to my class of Power and Politics with Peter Boumgarden, I was aware of the politics within the company. I was able to read the room and navigate conversations taking the lessons I learned from the course into account.

The CEL project I did over the spring taught me how to work on a broad end-to-end project and manage relationships with the team and main stakeholders.

How the internship is preparing me for my final year at business school?

Managing my own project at Microsoft has helped me develop the confidence to lead a CEL project in the fall semester. I also feel more comfortable with broad or ambiguous projects. The internship at Microsoft gave me the opportunity to interact with very talented people, interns and full-time employees, and make new connections I can leverage during my last year of the MBA.

Part of a series about summer internships from Olin MBA ’20 students. Today we hear from Ian Belkin, who worked with MUTE International in Shanghai.

I spent my summer interning at a startup in Shanghai named MUTE International. MUTE is an acronym for Multiple Urban Transport Evolution. The company provides green, energy efficient, electric scooters to consumers, eschewing ownership in favor of month-to-month usership.

The business model is similar to the WeWork or Cort models, but functions in the transportation space through an app that provides a streamlined and frictionless set-up, requiring no down payment or credit card.

My role as an intern has comprised creating cashflow and other financial projections of expected growth as well as constructing pitch decks to court potential investors in future rounds of funding.

One fear inevitably shared by participants in internships with such truncated timelines is that the challenges and responsibilities conferred upon them will be rote and lack significance. Fortunately, my personal experience at MUTE has been quite the opposite.

There exists a plethora of substantive, engaging and challenging assignments to be tackled. Since its inception, MUTE has been aggressively expanding into nascent markets and now boasts offices across three continents, in locations as diverse as London, Bali, Shanghai, Perth, and Lyon.

A large portion of my early efforts were spent investigating the financial viability of three additional proposed outlets in Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and Ho Chi Minh City (to my great disappointment, I was not invited to participate in the on-the-ground due diligence in any of these exotic locales).

Accounting for the nuances associated with breaching new markets is an interdisciplinary exercise: marketing and scaling bleed into operations and logistics, all of which are framed and constrained by the vagaries and realities of financing.

This internship experience has provided ample opportunity to develop and meld the various core tenets of business espoused in the first year of our Olin MBA program.

Inevitably, start-ups succeed based on the unbridled passion and proclivity towards masochism of their founding members. MUTE is the brainchild of Patrick Davin, an intrepid and indefatigable Aussie with 25 years of experience in the electric scooter market and a successful IPO already to his credit.

Beyond the evolution of my technical skills, bearing consistent witness to Patrick’s inimitable enthusiasm and perseverance were the most valuable commodity I left with. Leadership, another often-touched upon trope within Olin is not only preached, but practiced on a daily basis at MUTE.

I feel fortunate to have earned the opportunity to learn directly from Patrick, and hope to impart my newly acquired wisdom upon my return to Olin and upon all future endeavors thereafter.

Part of a series about summer internships from Olin MBA ’20 students. Today we hear from Fifunmi Ogunmola, who worked at United States Tennis Association as a finance intern.

How I prepared for my interview/landed the internship

Over the summer, I was a finance intern at the United States Tennis Association. I had applied for corporate finance intern roles on LinkedIn, MBA Focus and other job boards and then, I received a call from a director at the USTA as part of a pre-interview screening. I eventually interviewed with a senior finance director, who became my manager.

I prepared for the interview with resources from the Weston Career Center. I had mock interviews with some of my peers. Also, I had access to resources to help me prepare for finance-specific interview questions.

How I used what I’ve learned at Olin during my internship

With multiple team projects and club activities in our first year, we learned collaboration. This proved useful during my internship. I had to work with my teammates, other interns and staff in other departments.

In addition, learning critical and strategic thinking in my classes helped me put my summer project in perspective; the model I was developing was not just to solve a department’s problem, but to provide a solution with nationwide impact.

How the internship prepared me for my final year at business school

Prior to the internship, I asked my manager in an email how to prepare for the internship. He asked me to come with an open mind. I saw the relevance of that advice multiple times during the internship. Beyond learning new technical and managerial skills, I learned so much about an unfamiliar industry.

As I begin my final year of business school, I intend to have an open mind; to explore more opportunities to connect and to embrace learning in all forms.

A day in the life

9:00 a.m.: Workday officially begins.

9:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m.: Check emails; check-in with manager on revisions to the 2020 budget presentation; check-in with teammates; complete pending tasks.

10:00 a.m. – 10:30 a.m.: Intern check-in with the New York office.

10:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.: Work on tasks for the day; attend meetings (with teammates, other departments, work mentor etc.).

12:30 p.m. – 1:30 p.m.: Lunch and learn (professional development sessions over lunch).

1:30 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.: Complete tasks for the day; work on summer project or other projects.

3:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.: Intern project meeting.

4:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.: Work continues.

5:00 p.m.: Already?! Tomorrow is another day!

How the internship is shaping my long-term career goals

The projects I worked on during the internship further revealed my career interests in finance and data analytics. This has guided my selection of classes and my decision to take complementary courses on LinkedIn Learning.

In addition, some of the lunch and learn sessions I attended taught practical skills on corporate communication, networking with senior executives and building a personal brand, all important elements of career success.

I believe that as I continue to gain the academic knowledge required to achieve my career goals, and as I build upon these specific skills learned during my internship, I am on the path to an enriching career.

Part of a series about summer internships from Olin MBA ’20 students. Today we hear from Abraham Kola-Amodu, who worked at AT&T as a finance intern.

I spent 13 weeks of the summer as a finance leadership development program intern at AT&T corporation. Before landing this opportunity, I harnessed available resources within and outside of Olin. I attended conferences, browsed company websites, job search websites and finally, the now disengaged MBA Focus.

The latter was where I’d found the job posting, as AT&T has some partnership with Olin Business School. I applied and was invited to perform a personality test online, which led me to the next stage.

Before my first interview, I recalled that the last interview I’d had was over a month prior. I knew I was rusty and not smooth, so I engaged Jeff Stockton, a career coach with the Weston Career Center, who gave me a solid prep one hour before my interview. The rest is news.

My work at AT&T, even though it was in finance, entails a lot of project and team management. Luckily, a lot of team activities, people, time and project management skills were taught in the first year, and that was what helped me the most in the period of my internship.

For the remainder of business school, I intend to brush up more on some aspects of finance, because there were some topics that I saw a few other interns discuss and I was totally blank on. This is not to say there were no topics I knew that were alien to them also.

My typical day at work is very unlike many others. I spend about three to four hours a day on meetings. Why? Because my role is heavily strategy based and by reason of that, I must meet with different teams on what to do next, appraise what was done and decide how to make improvements to the existing ideas and concepts we have.

Another hour or so of my day is spent networking—coffee chats or meet-and-greets with the top-level management company officials. Also, in many instances, an hour is spent on events or programs organized specifically for the interns, which ranges from volunteer activities to trainings and happy hour. The remainder of the day is my “me time” to do my actual work.

The finance leadership development program is geared at getting MBAs to lead the company, which is why it is structured in a way that we always meet with the executives. Networking is very vital in climbing the corporate ladder here at AT&T, thereby helping me get set of achieving my C-suite goal.