My Summer in Brew City

In my true blogging style I am going to start off this post with the random picture of the day. I know it is Friday and Throwback Thursday was yesterday but this pictures comes to us straight out of 1998 or so when my Dad took us skiing. A belated Happy Fathers Day to him and all the fathers out there.

I can’t believe that my internship is almost half way over already. I am finishing up my 5th week of the 12 week program today. In my last blog post of the semester I wrapped up everything that had happened during Junior year and let you know that I was headed to the wonderful “Cream City”, “Beertown”, “The City of Festivals” ….. did none of those ring a bell? Well I am in the great little city of Milwaukee Wisconsin this summer, home of the typewriter, one of the best cities for independent filmmakers, and the 22nd largest city in America.

Now that you know a little bit about where I am this summer, let me explain to you how I got here. I finished my finals on March 14th and then flew back home to Boston to see my family for a few days. While at home I met with friends and caught up with my local dentist, doctor, and got my driver’s license renewed. All just in enough time to see my sister graduate from Worcester State College. Right after her graduation I left with my brother to make the road-trip out to Milwaukee.

Since there is a lot of travel in the internship I needed a car for the summer and because the trip to Milwaukee was a 16 hour drive, I decided to embark on it with my brother. The intention was to get to Milwaukee by Sunday March 19th in just enough time to get unpacked and start my internship on March 20th. The interesting things about road-trips is that they generally never go as expected. Our case was no different. Usually you hear about overheating cars, popped tires, or a broken air conditioner however when my brother and I crossed into Pennsylvania we ran into some deer problems quite literally. The damage to the car was two broken headlights, a dented hood, a passenger side door that could barely open and some shattered glass. We were all okay but could no longer drive at night due to the broken headlights. We rested for a night at a hotel but needed to get up early in the morning in order to make it to Milwaukee in time for my brother’s plane flight home. Thankfully our car’s motor was still in great shape and we had a one hour time difference on our side to make me breathe a bit easier. We ended up getting to Milwaukee just in time for my brother’s plane flight and I successfully made it to the first day of my internship with a crazy story to tell. (Update: our trusty car has since been fixed and is fairing quite well in Milwaukee)

My internship at GE Healthcare thus far has been all that I have ever wanted and more. As I had said in my previous post I am interning as part of a Commercial Leadership Program. It is a specific sales and marketing internship within GE Healthcare. I know, right now you are thinking “I thought I was reading blogs of engineers.” Well you absolutely are. My major is Biomedical Engineering. For the past two summers I have had very technical internships that have put my engineering skills to work, however I have always had an interest in business, innovation, marketing, and entrepreneurship. I thought, what better way to gain exposure to these concepts outside of the classroom than to have an internship in them. I know I like healthcare and ultimately would like to work for a healthcare company but doing marketing and sales for a healthcare company opened up a whole new path for me.

Now as for what has me so happy with my internship thus far! My project this summer is great. I am working on the launch of an internal tool called Salesforce.com, some of you might have heard of this before. It is a complete Customer Relationship Management solution. Initially I was in charge of a portion of the program which deals with Install Base, what the product portfolio of a current account looks like (can either be company product or competitor product). This IB data can be used to help a sales specialist identity a strategy to break into, expand, or occupy a current account. After working on the project I was fascinated with how the launch was going to work and what makes for a successfully deployment. Therefore I took on some more tasks which included building macros in excel in order to easily manipulate data for salesforce.com upload, creating a communication plan for the deployment of salesforce.com to the field, coordinate training, and deliver training to the product sales specialists and marketing teams.

In addition to my project work, I have been having a blast getting involved with the intern program by taking a team leadership position as a Co-Editor of the CLPi Newsletter. We also are given a lot of opportunities to learn throughout the summer and have training modules set up by the full time CLPs such as:

Healthcare 101
Sales 101
Excel 101
Hospital 101
Negotiation 101

Also we will have a Sales Simulation contest come the end of July and also a Colab Team Project in which we have to conduct a customer profile. I am happy to have all these opportunities to submerge myself in the sales and marketing side of healthcare. I am really liking everything I have been doing so far.

The interns in the program are pretty awesome as well. There are 16 of us in total, 2 of whom are remote. We all mostly live in the same apartment complex and get along great. We have been doing a lot of fun things outside of work so far like going to a Milwaukee Brewers game, attending the Milwaukee Domes for a horticulture experience, grabbing great food in the historic Third Ward, going to the beach, and golfing. We are planning on doing a lot of other great things as the summer goes on such as a pedal tavern, sky diving, going boating on Lake Michigan, and even planning a day trip down to Chicago. I am also a foodie at heart and two great things about Milwaukee is that there are a lot of awesome places to eat and almost every restaurant has a Fish Fry Friday menu as well as a Brunch menu on Sunday. I would highly recommend trying out some of the unique items on these hidden menus.

Along with all of these great things that we are doing I have some plans of my own during the summer. From July 3rd to the 6th, Taylor is going to come and visit. We are going to have a great time in Milwaukee and Chicago and might even get to attend some of Summerfest. We also purchased tickets to see the hilarious musical Book of Mormons in Chicago. Also at the end of July I will be going to Miami, OH in order to be a Peer Mentor for Phi Delta Theta. It will be a lot of fun to see unique perspectives from different chapters and help them to work through their questions and problems. Lastly I will be attending Lollapalooza, for the second time in a row, in Chicago from August 2nd to August 4th and plan on seeing a lot of my USC friends there.

Hats off to a great summer! Can’t wait to see what the rest has in store.

Fight On,

Brenton

Now Playing: Wake Me Up by Avicii (Ft. Aloe Blacc) with Bearly Legal (the new album) by White Panda on deck.