Tag: mecop

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Painting a picture of success at Daimler

Ian Bacon

Ian Bacon arrived at Daimler last summer for his MECOP internship ready to use his BIS and accounting studies to create value for the truck maker, and vehicles that leave the factory with better, more efficiently applied paint jobs are the lasting impact of his six months with the company.

“I started out doing the typical BIS sorts of things,” said Bacon, who’ll graduate from the College of Business in June. “Extracting things from databases, finding information for reports, creating process flow diagrams.”

Then Daimler turned him loose to work with information on truck painting that had been collected in a thorough manner but had never been analyzed or put to work.

“I was able to find a lot more useful information than anyone realized was there, kind of surprising findings,” he said “I developed that into a very thorough suite of reports, including a real-time feedback version for the actual paint shops in plants. Before, the company had a system and they put in numbers, but no one ever saw the results – the inspectors, the painters, the engineers, the plant floor people. We were able to put this information into a system for all of their truck plants, to get this thing useful and fun for everyone. Now if something isn’t happening quite right, in can be corrected immediately.”

In addition to his College of Business education, Bacon’s background includes seven years of learning about industrial processes while working at … Disneyland.

“I worked on rides, was the supervisor for rides, supervisor for some special events,” said Bacon, who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. “In 2008 I did the operational testing and adjustments when ‘It’s a Small World’ underwent a major renovation. Working at Disneyland taught me a lot about business and industrial stuff. Disneyland is an industrial environment, even though it doesn’t look like one. You have to get people safely onto rides, rides break down, things happen, there are lots of regulations, lots of business needs behind the scenes, and I took all of that to the truck factory floor at Daimler. I knew how to talk to people and find out what I needed to know.”

After graduation, Bacon will do a second six-month MECOP internship, this one with Garmin AT, the aviation technology subsidiary of the GPS-focused company. Where he ends up after that depends in part on where his wife, who works in social services, attends graduate school.

“Oregon is a fantastic place,” he said. “When I came and visited, I was looking here and down the road in Eugene, but OSU was more directly interested in me and in students in general. It was much more personal, plus it had the MECOP program, which was a selling point.”

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Students give their education a lift with summer internships

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College of Business student Parker Edwards on his internship this summer with Alaska Airlines.

Oregon State College of Business student Parker Edwards heard a familiar phrase over and over this summer.

“I don’t know if this is possible, but …”

The Business Information Systems major spent his summer in Seattle with Alaska Airlines as a systems and process intern. Working with maintenance and engineering, Edwards’ job was to structure the huge amount of data connected to every aircraft and make it easier to find areas needing repair.

“I love data,” Edwards said. “It’s so powerful. People get really excited. Someone would come in and say, I don’t even know if this is possible, but if you can find a way … if I could click a button.”

Edwards was just one of a number of College of Business students who worked around the country and the world this summer as interns with some of the biggest companies in their industries.

Edwards’ role with Alaska combined his interest in technology and problem solving with his love of aviation.

“I want to get my pilot’s license as soon as I get out of school,” he said. “Also working with an airline that’s as prominent in the northwest as Alaska was a great opportunity.”

Interning with an airline also comes with perks beyond great experience.

Between his time as a system and process analysis intern with Alaska, Edwards and other interns flew free around the west coast and to Alaska and Hawaii. Edwards’ favorite trip was a day in Honolulu, leaving in the morning and returning the next day.

Edwards also had a great view at the office.

“Because it’s at the hangar, you can go downstairs at any given time and there would be 747s and just outside the door it’s SeaTac International Airport,” he said. “That was probably the coolest thing I could do there.”

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Georgia Brown on her internship with Daimler Trucks North America.

Georgia Brown is still finishing her summer internship with Daimler Trucks North America in Portland.

That’s because Brown is part of MECOP. The prestigious, Oregon industry-sponsored program places students in a pair of paid six-month internships with some of the biggest firms in the Northwest.

“The most appealing thing about it was the fact that I would graduate with a year’s worth of work experience in my major,” Brown said. “I’m not exactly sure what I want to do once I’m out of college and having the chance to work for some of the most competitive companies in the Northwest is a great way to find out.”

As a project management intern in the Daimler IT Finance department, Brown works as an analyst for her group, bringing together research from different sources to create easy-to-comprehend reports on a variety of topics.

“Since I started my internship, I’ve developed the department’s Sharepoint site, created a customer relationship database in Access, and am working on documenting and learning TM1,” she said. “My knowledge of IT in general has improved and developed way more than I ever thought it would.”

Beyond the valuable real-life experience, Brown said her internship has helped her learn more about what she wants out of her own career.

“I’ve talked to students before who are hesitant to do an internship because they don’t know if they would enjoy that field, but I think this is the best way to try different career options and see what works for you,” she said.

In the School of Design and Human Environment Internship Program, more than 163 students completed internships during the 2012- 2013 school year with more than 109 companies. Overall, 11 students interned in New York City’s Garment District, eight in Los Angeles and three internationally.

Through the program, facilitated by SDHE Internship Coordinator Sandy Burnett, students take a preparatory class before their internship and then a “Field Experience” course during, with weekly check-ins to mark progress and goals.

Merchandising Management student Kahli Lanning interned with Donna Karan during the summer, where she was able to work with teams from Donna Karan Japan.

“Getting to sit in on their meetings and being able to practice my Japanese in a business setting was a great experience for me,” Lanning said. “It is a great program, and I think the experience I gained will be invaluable to my future career.”

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Oregon State students get head start on careers with MECOP internships

Rachel Sauter and Xandra Jobe stand with other Intel interns during their MECOP internship earlier this school year.

Oregon State senior Xandra Jobe is pretty clear when it comes to how much she got out of her experience with the MECOP internship program.

“It’s probably the single most valuable thing I’ve done as an undergrad,” Jobe said.

MECOP places students in two paid, six-month internships, each with a different company. The program is currently accepting applications for its 2014 program, with a deadline of April 10.

Jobe is planning to graduate from Oregon State spring term and interned with Intel in the summer and fall.

A marketing major, Jobe worked with Intel’s Client Board division and helped to head up the department’s social media efforts along with fellow College of Business student and MECOP intern Rachel Sauter.

The pair helped coordinate, produce and publish social media posts for the group, researching and developing strategies that could provide a tangible return on investment for Intel.

“I was the one who updated it and helped decide what the key messages were that needed to go out,” she said. “Just the variety and magnitude of the things I was given to do went way beyond what I expected.”

Sauter, a Business Mangement major, also worked on data anlysis reports for the department and helped troubleshoot a new website before launch.

“Being a part of launching a product was really fun,” Sauter said. “It was such a broad range of experiences, I was able to apply all my knowledge from school and from working in my family business.”

Jobe said the experience gave her not only real-life job experience but also a group of mentors who are already helping her shape her next steps after graduation.

“I can’t even really put into words all the things I got out of it,” she said. “My idea of what a job is and what a career could look like has developed immensely. I have resume items that are competitive with other people. I’m not going into the workforce blind.”

Sauter, graduating this spring, already feels like she’ll be a better employee because of her internships through MECOP.

“The references I have now, I could get four or five good references from managers at Intel,” Sauter said. “This has been such a key part of my education, I can’t imagine graduating without it.”

Trevor Husseman working at Daimler Trucks in Portland for his MECOP internship.
Trevor Husseman working at Daimler Trucks in Portland for his MECOP internship.

Trevor Husseman, an accounting and business information systems major, spent this past summer with Daimler Trucks North America in Portland.

There he worked on an internal application repository system to track the applications Daimler employees used, and helped integrate that with a system Daimler’s international operation was expanding.

“It keeps track of applications created within Daimler that people use on the shop floor, on their computers that we created,” Husseman said. “I worked with one of the engineers and actually implemented it into production.”

The opportunity to push something into the company workflow motivated Husseman, giving him a taste of what his career could be like after graduation.

“I learned to step up my work and my work ethic,” he said. “This is real life. This is going into production so it has to be perfect.”

This summer he’ll participate in his second internship, this time with Garmin in Salem.

Husseman said he already feels better prepared for starting his job search once he leaves Oregon State.

“It prepares you so much for your first real job, it’s invaluable,” he said. “You’re a year ahead of everyone else that’s starting.”

Looking back at his experience and ahead to his joining the workforce, he can’t imagine entering without his time with MECOP.

“I get a year of experience and two six-months of awesome pay, but really the work experience was worth it,” he said. “I think MECOP is just phenomenal and anyone who doesn’t do it is crazy. How could you not in this day and age when it’s so competitive?”