Vladimir Gogish
Vladimir Gogish is a junior at the ILR School. He graduated from White Plains High School in White Plains, New York.
“I spent the summer of 2005 working for Deloitte Consulting and I was staffed on a project in Piscataway, New Jersey at one of the leading pharmaceutical companies in the world. I was engaged in a big HR consulting project. My role on it was two-fold. One aspect of it dealt with change management—helping folks deal with the new systems that were being implemented at the company.
“The other half of my time was spent with organizational design efforts—basically modeling what the structure of the organization would look like in the future after the systems were put in and new people were hired and jobs were changed around.
“I had never actually done an internship in a consulting firm. I have heard of students making copies and getting coffee, but this internship far exceeded any expectations that I had. I was really treated as a first year employee rather than a student intern. It was an incredible summer.
“I sat in on meetings. I took notes during interviews with clients. I really felt like the firm put a lot of trust in me and basically told me, here, run with it and see what you can do. I think I really built their confidence in me by performing well.
“I believe that this internship really helped me to understand just how important effective communication is on the job—and this could be applied to any internship or any permanent job. I was working on a team of Deloitte consultants and often I would be taking direction from two people and sometimes more. It demanded flexibility and prioritization on my part. It took good communication to structure the work in a way where I could be productive and not become overwhelmed. And just the way that the consultants interacted with each other and with the client really helped me to increase my level of professionalism and my interpersonal skills.
“Prior to the summer, I was strongly considering going to law school, but after my experience with Deloitte, I really shifted my focus, and at this point I am contemplating going into human resources or HR consulting.
“The culture here at ILR really is very oriented towards law school. Law school could be somewhere in my future, but right now, I really don’t want to go back to school after college. I loved working so much that I just want to get more experience and either get my MBA or my law degree in the future.
“I think any student can learn a great deal about the ‘real world’. Here at Cornell, everyone works hard—that’s a fact. But, just like college is different from high school, the working world is different from college. Just the routine you get into—all that really took a toll on me at first. It’s a great lesson for any student to learn—what it’s like to actually go to work and officially be there from 9-6 and then, go back and do more work at night.
“At ILR, you go to class and it’s over but in the real world, if you have a deadline, it’s not really over and you really just have to work, work, and work until you meet it. In the real world, there is no month long winter break. My summer internship was really a great lesson in time management and exposure to what the working world is like.”
