Well, the last few weeks of my internship completely flew by! I was kept busy between work, intern events, and summer planning for my student orgs on campus.
One of my favorite intern events was going to Cedar Point, an amusement park in Ohio. It was quite the trek – 3.5 hours each way – but totally worth it! It was a pretty busy day but we still made it on 5 rides. One of my favorite ones was The Dragster – 427 ft tall, reaching speeds of 120 mph. It was all over in 17 seconds, but it was so exhilarating!
Waiting to ride The Gate Keeper
In line for The Maverick!
The Dragster!!!!
The Information Systems (I/S) Interns all worked on a case competition for the duration of the summer. We were split into groups and had to come up with a supportable and innovative business solution, in the form of a service community, to make one of the IT services more useful to users. We had both a Coach who we met with on a weekly basis, and a Sponsor, who we met with about 2-3 times during the summer. Both of those resources proved to be very instrumental to our well-developed solution and presentation. We earned second place in the competition.
Team Solutionism
All of the I/S interns also had final presentations at the end of the summer. The Philly I/S interns flew into Midland using the Dow shuttle, and presented with the rest of the interns in Midland. We all presented our projects to the other interns, our Sponsors, and Directors. I put a lot of effort into my presentation, both the aesthetics and the verbal portion. I was a little nervous at first once I got up to present, but once I started talking, the words flowed and I completed it without any problems!
Since the Philly interns were in town with some full time Philly I/S employees, we all went out bowling! I actually wasn’t as bad of a bowler as I thought I was (I hadn’t been bowling in at least 8 years), and held my own pretty well.
Some of my really good intern friends at the bowling event.
For the last week of my internship, I didn’t have any intern activities, meetings, or other commitments in the Midland headquarters, so I was able to travel to Houston one last time and see everyone on my team that I had been working with over the summer. I got dinner with the Team Leads and Project Managers at an Italian restaurant, which was super yummy!
Something else that is slightly random – one of my coworkers is an avid Google fan, and he was one of the few people that was selected to participate in the pilot program for the Google Glass! The Glass won’t be available to the public until 2014, so this experiment group has a whole year to experiment with it and provide their input to the developers at Google. I was lucky enough to try it on a few times and play around with it!
Experimenting with the Google Glass
My internship at Dow was a really great experience and I’m really grateful for all of the opportunities I had. I learned a lot about Project Management in a large tech project, and met with employees from all different backgrounds within both Dow and Accenture. These one-on-ones opened my eyes to appealing opportunities, and showed me which paths I am not interested in.
All in all, I had a great summer, but am definitely looking forward to starting the new semester!
Catch you later,
Cassandra
