An Internship!!

So, now that it's almost Thanksgiving and things have calmed down a bit, it's about time that I talked a little about my internship search.


The BYU MBA program has several tracks, and my track (Organizational Behavior/Human Resources--here forth referred to as "OB/HR". Or maybe just as "HR". Or just "H". Or simply "".) has the earliest recruiting schedule for internships/jobs of any of the tracks. This is completely the opposite of my undergrad experience, where I quickly learned that there was no point in looking for a post-graduation job until at most a month before graduation.


Anyway, this early recruiting schedule (early as in, "Our first company information session was on day 4 of the semester") meant that I had to hit the ground running in almost full recruiting mode when the semester began. In working with my assigned mentor (a 2nd-year student who had already gone through the internship search process) during the summer, Lisa and I had already started putting together a list of 10 companies that we were going to focus on. Considering I was not even technically an MBA student at this point, I had no idea really what I was doing, so we were piecing together the list based off of very odd reasons. Based off of the fact that I had some background working with technology and enjoyed computers, we placed a smattering of tech companies like Microsoft, Dell, HP, Cisco, and Google on the list. Beyond that, we looked through the list of 2nd-year students and where they had interned, saw that someone had interned with NBC/Universal (a subsidiary of GE, at the time) and I put them on the list because I enjoyed entertainment. Then Lisa said, "You should put General Mills on their. I like their cereal." So they made it on the list. I know, I know--really scientific process, eh? But with that, I started calling 2nd-year MBA students who had interned at these various places.


As the recruiting season sped along, I went to Info Session after Info Session for these various companies, added other companies to the list, and applied online for internship postings, all the while praying for guidance as we went through process, so that we would end up where we could do the most good. As I went through the interviewing process and got to know more about these companies, I started to wonder whether the tech companies I was primarily pursuing would actually be a good fit for me in terms of work/life balance and life style. The manufacturing companies like GE and General Mills were starting to look much better in that regards. One of my fellow MBA students even mentioned that she felt like I would fit in really well at General Mills.

If there's one thing I can say about my interviewing style, it's that when I go in to an interview, they get me. I'm myself and, for better or for worse, not somebody else who I think they would like. I try to be polished with my answers and use my prepared stories about work experiences I've had where possible but, if they ask a type of question that I never prepared for, I don't hesitate to delve back into my days of Improv Comedy and I start pulling together answers on the fly. They get an answer that has better content than what I could have given them with one of my prepared responses, but the level of "MBA Polish" suffers significantly. But I'm okay with that.

The flip side to that is that I don't appeal to everyone for that same reason. One company that I did appeal to, though, was General Mills, who wanted to fly me back to Minneapolis for a 2nd-round interview(s). As I looked more closely at them in preparation for the flyback, I was impressed with the things I heard from my fellow students, many of whom had been gunning for a General Mills internship, but had not been invited for a 2nd-round interview.

So I flew out to Minneapolis for more interviews, and proceeded to be myself as usual. They apparently liked this because several days after I returned home they gave me an internship offer for this summer! The decision to accept was made a little less simple because I'd heard back several days prior from another company in California who wanted to fly me out, but after doing a comparison of the two companies, fasting, and praying Lisa and I both decided that we like General Mills enough that we were just going to go ahead and accept the offer.



We're both very excited for the opportunity that this represents, and I'm happy for the things I'll be learning with General Mills this summer! We won't know until roughly March where we'll actually be, but there's about a 50/50 chance that we'll be in either the headquarters in Minneapolis, or in one of General Mills' plants somewhere in the rest of the country. Either way, I'm excited for the possiblities, and I'm very happy to be able to just focus on my schoolwork now!