Kate Hudson
I knew that I wanted to spend a semester off campus, but I wasn’t sure if that was through a study abroad or credit internship program, so I applied to both programs. I was accepted to a program in London for study abroad, and then I got a couple of offers from different companies. I had to think about what I wanted to do and decided that the credit internship program would be a valuable learning experience that I wouldn’t be able to do any other time. The thing I liked about it was that it’s much longer than just a summer internship; it went from the beginning of January until the middle of August. I felt I could get involved in the company and see projects from start to finish.
I worked on the U.S. University Recruiting team at IBM in Raleigh, North Carolina. I had three offers from three great companies, all different locations. I looked at what I would actually be doing in my day to day work, and I chose IBM because in the end, university recruiting sounded really interesting to me. I thought that I could be a great part of the team because I was in the age group that they were focusing on for recruitment.
They gave me a lot of projects to work on. I was the editor of a national newsletter for co-ops and their managers called Epic Express. I was also the president of a social networking group for co-ops at the Raleigh site called Future Blue, and by the time summer started, we had almost 300 interns. Another project I did was look at all the schools where IBM recruits to determine if they were recruiting at the right campuses. The company recruits at about one hundred and twenty universities. I looked at a number of different factors, such as employee rating scores, diversity, U.S. News and World Report rankings, the number of offers given out at each school, and the number of acceptances of offers from each school.
I got to work on a team to design the university plan for the fall recruiting season. We designed bookmarks, fliers, giveaways, and came up with a recruitment slogan. I also managed a co-op database and would send out weekly reminders to managers who had co-ops coming on board to make sure they were ready for their experience. I also sent out reminders to make sure managers did an exit interview and evaluation when their students left.
While I was in Raleigh, I wrote a paper on work-life balance as a requirement of my internship. The paper tied directly into things we talk about in Organizational Behavior and Human Resource classes. I examined IBM’s work-life balance policies and it was really nice to see that the things they taught us in class are actually used in the workplace. They have some really interesting work life policies at IBM. Forty percent of IBM employees work from home—they don’t actually work in the office. The company trusts its employees with that kind of freedom. And if you’re a working parent, the option to work from home is great.
I learned a lot from my work at IBM. I learned a lot about professionalism and corporate life in general. All of my previous work had been in an academic setting. I worked for a number of summers at the University of Georgia doing research, and I also worked at Cornell in a couple of different offices. The corporate world is very different. Learning the importance of taking the initiative on a project was a huge lesson I took away from my internship. Managers aren’t waiting to give you tasks; they really want you to step up and get involved in projects on your own. I think when I go to my next job, that lesson will really help me get ahead.
I loved university recruiting, but realized that’s not really what I want to do when I graduate. It was nice to be able to test out something that I thought I might have been interested in.
I absolutely recommend the credit internship program because you’re not going to get that kind of learning experience anywhere else. In my senior year at ILR, we talk about case studies in some of my classes. I’m taking an organizational development class right now where the professor will talk about change techniques, and I can think about my time at IBM and see that they were using those techniques there. When I look at a case study, I can add suggestions by looking at processes IBM had in place. It helps out both ways. My course work helped me in my job, and then my job helps me in my course work. It also helped me realize that in the future, I would like to be doing consulting.