Undergraduate Admissions

Renee Lee is a senior at the ILR School. She is from Weston, Massachusetts, and graduated from Weston Public High School.

“I matured and grew as an individual as a result of this experience. I now understand what it means to wake up early in the morning and commute to work, to be responsible for paying rent, managing my expenses and really getting a taste of what the 9 to 5 lifestyle is like. It was a great opportunity for me to be truly independent.”

Renee spent the spring semester of her junior year working as an intern in Compensation for the Human Capital Track at Deloitte Consulting LLP, in New York City.

“I was torn between choosing credit internship and going abroad for the semester. I was interested in either being in New York City or in a program either in Spain or England so that I could gain more of an international experience. After attending credit internship program workshops and meeting with Professor Daniel and Brigid Beachler, I changed my mind about going abroad.

“With a credit internship, I would have the opportunity to obtain career knowledge, strengthen my resume, and explore a new city for me. It seemed like a win-win situation, especially with the credits involved—you get a total 12 credits out of the program while working at a reputable company or organization and attending a workplace-related class at the Cornell Extension School in Manhattan.

“The first time I looked at the database of companies with credit internships available, I selected most of them based on name recognition and their descriptions of the positions available. Some of the questions I asked myself were, ‘Is this a large company? Am I familiar with it? Where are they located?’ I chose companies and organizations that were different from those that I had already had prior related work experience. I wanted to try something new, perhaps non-profit or maybe on the consulting side.

“One of the interesting things about working as an intern is that you can easily become involved in a myriad of projects—some are big, some are meaningful and some not so meaningful. Most of my projects and proposals at Deloitte Consulting focused on executive compensation. The largest project that I got to work on was a proposal to acquire work for our team, to do work for Bloomberg. That required a long proposal where we would give them ideas on how we could restructure their whole bonus procedure. I put in a lot of hours on that project—a lot of power point production, boiler plate language editing and a lot of drafting. Most of the work done on projects included heavy use of PowerPoint, Excel, and Access.

“My other major assignment was working on the Client Relationship Management project. As a consulting company, we are heavily audited, so within our own division we wanted to make sure that we were up to date on which clients we were working with and that we were compliant under federal regulations. I spent a great deal of time researching our clients and accessing the work we had done for them and documenting it. This required the use of search engines such as Hoover’s, Business One Source and SEC government filings.

“The third project was updating their qualifications database. This was a self-directed project where I had a lot of room for creativity. Their current data base was primarily a large spreadsheet in Access and I took this information and created a form that made finding information easy. The data base form was ‘user friendly’ and easy to update.

“When I first started to work in the consulting environment, I found that I had to be very self-motivated. I had to be more aggressive than what I was accustomed to in order to be included on assignments. Nonetheless, I had a great deal of autonomy, even when staffed on a project. My major responsibility was to support my direct managers in requests for proposals and ongoing projects. This consisted mainly of PowerPoint production and research using surveys from our library, data obtained from Bloomberg machines and the research engines mentioned above. I also conducted research in areas of executive compensation, such as the trends in grant practices and innovative ways to compensate beyond stock options.

“I matured and grew as an individual as a result of this experience. I now understand what it means to wake up early in the morning and commute to work, to be responsible for paying rent, managing my expenses and really getting a taste of what the 9 to 5 lifestyle is like. It was a great opportunity for me to be truly independent.

“I gained valuable insight into the consulting world, which later helped make important career decisions. The relationships I made with my coworkers were invaluable. Even after the internship, they continue to offer guidance and support. Most importantly, the credit internship experience made me realize the applicability of my Cornell course work and the knowledge I had gained there thus far.

“I would highly recommend this to any student. As a matter of fact, I think the Credit Internship is such a great opportunity, students should strongly consider it when applying to a program at Cornell. The Credit Internship is a fairly unique opportunity where you can get a great internship, build up your resume, learn a lot about an industry, use what you learn in your education and apply it. Best of all, you get to have fun while doing all of the above.

“The Credit Internship Office at ILR is phenomenal—they put me in the right direction in terms of what my options were, where I should look, and how to follow up. Initially, I knew very little about the program. I wasn’t sure what the internship actually entailed. After a few visits to the office, I was fully aware of the internship process from application to living arrangements in Manhattan.

“I accepted a full-time position at Deloitte this past fall. After graduation, I will be working in the executive compensation team again but this time as an analyst. I was able to bypass the entire recruitment and job hunting process my senior year, which needless to say was a huge relief!”