Summer School: Experiential Learning at Industry Internships
By Elizabeth Donaldson
Students from each of the Integrated Innovation Institute spent the summer putting their interdisciplinary training to work at summer internships. Though their offices were remote, students still gained valuable industry experience.
Explore the internships by industry interest:
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Or by professional interest:
Product Management
Anna Gipsov (MIIPS Advanced Study '20)
Product Intern, Atolla
"This summer I was the Product Intern at Atolla, which is a custom skincare brand. Some of my responsibilities were:
- Product development for upcoming product launches, which included modular-ingredient cleansers and moisturizers for users with different skin pH and skin concerns, and sunscreens
- Science writing & working with Marketing for educational and social content, where I researched and wrote about skincare and ingredients
- Assessing UX flow for alignment with value propositions, where I worked on some digital product aspects
- User research and persona study to inform longer term strategy, which was the most exciting element for me because I learned so much about the different types of users and their differences in needs and decision-making when buying/judging beauty products.
My favorite project was developing sunscreens because I got to use my technical knowledge to plan out how the company could design their version of the product that fit their specific brand and value offerings.
I was surprised at how much a company can accomplish with a small, hardworking team. I learned that startups can have an advantage of moving/developing quickly as people are tightly knit and collaborate on cross functional projects. Atolla’s unique value prop (of education in beauty) has motivated me to study underserved value propositions in beauty for my thesis and learn more about consumer behavior in evaluating them."
Anita Poulose (MSSM '20)
Product Manager Intern, Propeller Health
"I interned as a product manager at Propeller Health (ResMed subsidiary), which is in the field of connected (IoT) healthcare devices. My primary responsibilities included leading a team of developers and designers to develop and release medication tracking features and conceptualizing and creating a concept document, which outlined a new product features. I got hands-on experience in multiple aspects of product management, such as user research, competitive analysis, user journey mapping, and leading cross-functional teams to design the features.
The most exciting aspect of the internship was in gaining domain knowledge in the field of connected (IoT) healthcare devices. Healthcare space is heavily regulated and influenced by multiple players such as FDA, Payers, Pharmacies, PBMs, and care-givers. Understanding and navigating through these aspects, to accomplish the product management goals was the most interesting aspect. The most exciting element of the internship was the opportunity to conceptualize a strategic initiative that will improve market coverage of the Propeller products.
My favorite summer project was conducting extensive user research and conceptualizing MVP for medication tracking device. As part of the project, I did extensive user research through moderated and unmoderated studies and used the findings to identify the key features. I presented my findings to the senior leadership including the CTO.
I was integrated into the product team, and I was given the same level responsibilities of responsibilities as that of a full-time product manager. I was also given actionable feedback at a regular cadence that helped me tremendously.
I thoroughly enjoyed the process of taking a feature from conceptualization to launch while navigating domain-specific nuances. One of the key learnings from the internship is that a product manager should back every decision with data or supporting evidence. Understanding when to dig deep to collect supporting data is important to be efficient and effective."
Eileen Wang (MIIPS Advanced Study '20)
Product Management Intern, Open Learning Initiative
"There is not a more critical time than now to help students learn remotely, independently, and effectively. OLI is addressing an important problem in the world today, and I know that the work I produced has the potential to have a lasting positive impact beyond my time there. My role was to uncover instructor pain points through interviews and secondary research, and propose and prototype a new onboarding tool that enables instructors to adopt learning science practices.
Over the summer, I set out to explore instructor use cases and create a tool that can help them design courses using a learning science mindset. I created a course template that helps instructors adopt the mindset of a learning scientist. The template provides a scaffolding for instructors to document a teaching hypothesis, set up learning objectives, and establish measurable skills that students will learn. Together, these form the basis for a course design that can be iterated over time, helping students meet the course’s clearly articulated goals more and more effectively.
The MIIPS IPD process is very adaptable for all the challenges I encountered at work. It guided me to create the artifacts necessary to create understanding among my colleagues, and planned for future work that needs to be done. The internship experience showed me that because of what I've learned at MIIPS, I now have the tools to discover and define any problem space I'm addressing. It also confirmed for me that after graduating, product management is the right role for me to be in, in order to be positioned to create the kind impact I'd looking to make."
Read more about Eileen's experience: https://www.eileenwang.work/oli-case-study
Phil Chwistek (MSSM '20)
Product Management Intern, Microsoft
"I spent my summer interning at Microsoft as a Program Management intern. I was assigned to a team with three other interns and was tasked with managing our project scope, requirements, and process. I was also responsible for helping my team resolve any roadblocks that came up during development.
Our intern team worked on the same project for the whole course of our internship. We were given almost complete freedom over the vision and were a small semi-autonomous team within a larger one. Having that level of ownership really motivated us to put our best work forward and create a solution with real user value.
The most exciting element of my internship was actually having the chance to put our solution in front of users and hear their thoughts and feedback. We spent weeks researching and designing a solution and to see users react positively left us with a great feeling. Especially when we took their thoughts, made iterative changes to our product, and came back to them with something better.
I was pleasantly surprised by how well my team and I were able to work remotely. Without ever meeting one another in the “real” world, we were able to create a product of the same level of quality as if the internship took place in person. Our managers and mentors also did a great job of ensuring we were getting the support and guidance that we needed and were always available to us.
I found the entire experience incredibly rewarding, particularly because we had the chance to take our solution from ideation to minimum viable product. It definitely validated my interest in product management and signaled to me that I should continue along this career path."
Radha Tangirala (MSSM '20)
Program Manager Intern, Climate Corp.
"In “The Climate Corporation”, I worked as a Program Manager Intern. My major responsibilities inclided but not limited to:
- Led program execution across all technical (Product, Science, and Engineering) function
- Defined project management processes, tooling and templates to improve the operating model maturity of a scaling product
- Dive deep into data and advocate for solutions
The most exciting part of my internship was I had a mentor who believed in my work from day 1, he showed lot of confidence in my work style, and that trust made me confident each day and helped me deliver great value. It was surprising to see such level of inclusiveness especially in a remote internship, in times when it was not easy to showcase work and build credibility.
I enjoyed managing a Program which had multiple projects being released as part of Phase 2. I created delivery plans and managed the execution of the project. But most important and exciting part was, while I was collaborating with various teams for my daily deliverables, I identified major gaps in the Program and Project Governance process in Climate and I took this as an opportunity and designed project governance process and established the process by creating templates to support the process. This has been one of my most impactful work where I established Project Governance process for Climate and by the end of my tenure, all teams incorporated this process.
I was surprised by the way “The Climate Corporation” was leveraging machine learning and deep learning models to solve real time problems of Growers/Farmers and were providing them with a solution that would make farming and food sustainable.
I love being part of products that bring larger impact and greater value to the society. I strongly believe that technology can be leveraged for larger good. I always considered using data driven approach and machine learning products help us analyze data and make informed decisions. Working in “The Climate Corporation” has helped me work through some hard data driven problems and that I am sure that will help me in my career as a Product/Program Manager."
Radha was recognized by The Climate Corporation with the 2020 Best Intern Award.
Raquel Perez (MSSM '20)
Product Manager Intern, DocuSign
"Over the summer, I had a broad range of responsibilities as a Product Manager intern at DocuSign. My main project was to analyze the company’s partner categories to prioritize opportunities to scale a new product offering within DocuSign’s Agreement Cloud.
Being a Product Manager intern was an incredible learning opportunity - everyone I connected with was happy to share their experiences and those I collaborated with were supportive and provided great Product insights. Having a remote internship was a different experience than I had anticipated - nevertheless I was able to get a solid understanding of how important it is to rise to the occasion and what it means to be a generalist; two things that are incredibly important as a Product Manager."
Data Science & Business Analytics
Rahul (MIIPS Advanced Study '20)
Management Consultant Intern, Enso Consulting
Product Management Intern, Connect Wolf
"I was working on two part-time jobs this summer. As a Management Consultant Intern at Enso Consulting, I was working alongside a team of 5 to evaluate a market development opportunity for our client. Some of my responsibilities were doing customer discovery, performing a comprehensive market assessment and to put together a business model.
In my second project, I was working as a Product Management Intern at Connect Wolf, Consumer electronics start-up based off Pittsburgh. For the company’s prime physiological baby monitor product, I re-did the customer discovery process to uncover hidden technical and market assumptions in the business model. Following that, I designed experiments to test those critical assumptions. I wrote the product requirements for MVP, product vision and laid the roadmap.
For my Consulting internship, we did a hypothesis-driven customer discovery process. With COVID, the remote mode of research limited us to derive insights without ethnographic research(observing how our customers interact with the product in the real-world environment is critical since ‘what people say they do and what they actually do might be completely different’). However, working passionate teammates, we were able to gather good quality data through a series of extensive interviews with prospective customers and domain experts(through phone calls and zoom meetings) which helped us to frame our business model and propose three business scenarios which summarize the possible outcomes if the company decides to move forward. Reaching out to domain experts through cold emails and LinkedIn for appointments was particularly exciting whenever I got a positive response. For my PM internship, we had meetings all day on Friday. Sitting there on Fridays, listening to product designers, software developers, and manufacturing engineers was very exciting for me because I was able to understand ‘How their projects might add value to the business.’ I was able to talk confidently in the language of software developers, or even product designers. That was exciting to me as well.
A common theme with both the project is to work lean and efficiently. For example, in my consulting interview, we didn’t the budget for interviews, hence all 30+ interviews we did was through personal connections. I reached out to my cohort, and mentors, who helped me land with interviewees. All of my teammates did the same. Considering how critical good quality data is for making a business decision, we wouldn’t have done it without our professional network.
This summer internship has shed light on my career strategy to chase not the companies, nor products, but chase (and choose) a problem I really care about. This change in perspective is little new to me. I am looking forward to working with a creative bunch of people who are passionately striving to build a product which changes the human behaviour for the better. The consumer IoT space really fascinates me. It’s challenging and there is so much to learn. Innovation labs in big enterprises equally thrill me. I am confident of adding value wherever I end up working in."
Coco Cao (MSTV '21)
Business Operations Analyst, Blendid
"The company I was interning with is called Blendid. It is an AI intelligent hardware company that was founded in 2016. Blendid is making the world's first fully autonomous robotic smoothie kiosk. Process conformance using machine vision (cameras) and deep learning, so their robot never misses an object and never over-pours the smoothie in a cup, all can be done in real-time and contactless. They are under a B2B2C business model in which they sell or license their robotic kiosk directly to universities, hospitals, grocery stores, etc., with customers as their end-users. The three-month experience with Blendid helps me understand more on what is autonomy with a food robotics system, what it takes to reach autonomy for such a system, and how it can all be done safely and without any risk of cross-contamination.
I performed deep marketing analysis of Blendid consumer segmentation and purchase behavior, built and maintained sales forecast for each operating location, and analyzed actuals against forecast and reported insights to the executive team. Besides the main project on the market segmentation, the other three are launching delivery/catering service, the Hubspot customer relationship management platform, and helping them fundraising for the A+ round. For the segmentation project, the objectives are defining actionable, behavior-based Blendid consumer segments and develop a marketing communications plan to engage each segment and ultimately inspire increased Blendid purchase. This work itself was challenging at first because I have never had experience before analyzing customer's data.
The most interesting part of my work was the market segmentation project because it can help me enhance my Excel and data analytic skills, which I think is very helpful for my future career."
Shreya Agarwal (MSTV '21)
Solution Concept Developer Intern, Volvo Labs
"My responsibilities were quite varied from data science modelling to software engineering to product management. The most exciting element of my internship was being able to look at a project holistically. The key idea was to be able to explore all the areas that constituted a product like Data science, product management as well as software.
ATLAS is an endeavor by the Innovation Hub335 at Volvo Group to make telematics truck data at Volvo be accessible to relevant businesses. The problem being addressed is the non-availability of truck data to solution creators. From the perspective of the bigger picture it is important for overall growth infrastructural advancement of cities/states and even countries. This has been my favorite project this summer.
It was surprising how the team was "flat" in a big organization that Volvo is. I believe, being in Silicon Valley, Hub335 has absorbed the valley culture. It was wonderful to ask big/ small questions any time of the day to anyone in the team regardless of the position.
I feel I get a lot of drive from pursuing products as a whole rather than pursuing a single aspect of a product. Therefore I would be looking for roles which overall help me pursue a product holistically. After this experience, Product Management/entrepreneur/Intrapreneur are now my target roles for my career."
Software Engineering
Arjita Mahajan (MSSM '20)
Software Engineering Intern, LinkedIn
"I worked as a Software Engineer Intern as a Backend API engineer with the Feed Engineering team. My project at LinkedIn was the part of a bigger mission that aims at improving Customer engagement at LinkedIn. The most exciting part was that millions of users will be using the platform and a piece of code I worked on will be running behind the scenes to improve user experience. I implemented 'Content Carousel for in-Feed Follow' feature which ensures that member sees the most recent updates from User they follow. Previously, when a user clicked 'Follow' in LinkedIn feed, related 'Followee' recommendations were shown. User studies showed that showing recent updates of followed entity leads to an improvement in the DAU/MAU ratio. I also designed and developed API for 'Content Carousel for in-Feed Follow' in Java, which would aggregate results from LinkedIn's social graph services, handle deduplication logic, generate contextual headers before sending the result to web/mobile clients.
Even though the internship was virtual, the LinkedIn intern team organized various events to make sure that interns love the experience. There were many virtual events including Interns Got talent, Tiny campfires, intern speaker series, etc. I also got a chance to be part of the intern for cause events where various events were organized in partnership with WeHero such as Art for Social Equality, Virtual Education Social Justice, Operation First Response. We interns also raised funds for NGOs.
This internship experience, along with the skills I have gained at iii, has given me a practical implementation of leadership skills, LinkedIn craftsmanship principles which accelerate full ownership and delivering results with high quality."
Haitong Yu (MSSM '20)
Software Engineer Intern, Salesforce
"This summer, I worked at Salesforce as a Software Engineer Intern. My responsibilities included:
- Contribute to our testing infrastructure
- Implement code fixes under the direction of software architects and senior developers
- Develop well-tuned code that may be included as part of our next software release
I was an intern in the quality engineering team, and I mostly focused on test Execution and Coverage Dashboard. The full-stack quality engineering team does the work across front end, back end, and mobile. The dashboard gives the team clear information about the summary and the details across the areas. I applied computer science as well as software management knowledge to real industrial environments, which consolidated my domain knowledge gained from M.S. Software Management in CMU.
We had lots of fun intern activities throughout the summer. One of the most interesting ones is Virtual Museum Scavenger Hunt. Even we are work from home due to the pandemic, but we can still explore the museums in this unique, puzzle-filled, virtual museum scavenger hunt. We solved tricky brain teasers, puzzles, and riddles, their answers led us to fun questions about artworks and artifacts in numerous museums all over the country. I was shocked that we even can check more details with the help of technology. Also, all of the other interns (most of them are from top universities like CMU, MIT, UIUC, and UCB) are genius and friendly. It’s a wonderful experience to work with them.
The intern journey gave me the opportunity to explore the work in big tech companies and it paved the way for entering the industry."
Innovation & Design
Hannah Moon (MIIPS Advanced Study '20)
Digital Content Review Intern, PNC Bank
"This summer, I was working for the Digital Content Review Team in PNC Digital Experience Department. The Digital Content Review Team works with various digital-related products. It works with digital subject matter experts to review and validate that the content on PNC.com / PNC App is up-to-date with industry standards and product changes, among internal and external stakeholders. DCR team’s efforts involve collaborations amongst different stakeholders and great detail-focused specialties. The team serves both internal and external stakeholders. As for external customers, our team strived to help whoever has lending accounts with PNC. And for internal customers, at the team’s point, we served employees who have PNC online banking accounts and other LOBs. I drew a simple stakeholder map of my undertraining to visualize the relationship among different stakeholders and our team’s position. View the stakeholder map.
I felt that PNC is investing in its employees throughout my internship experience. It was one of their core value and I believe that it makes PNC stronger over time and creates a great business opportunity. Furthermore, PNC helped all interns to achieve a personal goal during the 6 weeks of summer internships. I made three goals for my six weeks of PNC internship experience:
- Understand the line of business better: I was new to the banking industry, so understanding the context of much of what our LOB did at the Digital Contents review team matters. I tried to equip myself with knowledge of financial markets, banking economics, and related technology trends. Also, I built a better understanding of the roles of different team members, the team's position, and the organizational structures.
- Master related technical skills: I learned how to predict consumer behaviors based on market prediction based on the regression model. At one point, we happened to meet a top economist at the bank and listened to the economic outlook. The experience was sensational and I have learned more about predicting future business opportunities and managing potential risks based on macroeconomics and microeconomics analysis in the banking system and got familiar with different analytic tools.
- Interpersonal skills: I especially wanted to learn how to communicate with the team, customers, and other stakeholders effectively and efficiently. I feel challenged to speak in front of people as being a non-native English speaker. The team helped me to connect with a mentor and it helped to boost my confidence. Meeting a mentor on a regular base helped me to grasp topics or ideas without losing a holistic view of my work and in the end, I felt a lot better to communicate with strangers.
The team, department, and entire company helped me to achieve my goals by guiding me to find and utilize the right resources.
Overall, working for PNC was great. I never worked for a bank or accounting/financing department in my previous career, so I am glad that I took a risk working for a bank. Whether it is a positive or a negative experience, experiencing the PNC internship helped me to gain real-world experience in the banking industries. The biggest takeaway is that I was able to see my personal and professional growth throughout my two internship experiences and I am proud of myself that I achieved my goal. Now I know what kind of company or job I want to work and where I do not want to spend my energy thanks to my wonderful summer experience at PNC. I am excited to see what my next job would look like after graduation."
Langley Vogt (MIIPS Advanced Study '20)
Associate Innovation Engineer, Honda R&D
"I spent my internship as an Associate Innovation Engineer with Honda R&D Americas, LLC (“Honda”). My employment resulted from the relationship my MIIPS Capstone team had developed with Honda during the previous semester, when we served as graduate-level consultants to the company. During our collaboration with Honda, our MIIPS team developed a proprietary mobility solution that Honda deemed so compelling that it purchased the IP rights to the concept. Honda then hired two members of our MIIPS Capstone team (a classmate and myself) to join its 99P Labs group to continue to explore the commercial viability of our concept. Working with members of the 99P Labs team, we further researched and validated our mobility solution throughout the 3-month internship.
My responsibilities at Honda were varied, and depended on the deliverables and goals we set as we progressed. Our 99P Labs team included three Honda R&D employees who specialized in software engineering, user values, and business, respectively. I focused my work on user research and insights for much of the summer, but performed other tasks, as well. For example, I would write user research interview questions one week and summarize proposed business models the following week. Discussion of some of my work can be found on Medium.
The most exciting element of my internship was being in an environment where I was learning new techniques and methods from very competent, experienced professionals. The 99P Labs team had an established collaboration dynamic that enabled us to work productively both independently and as a team. In particular, the way our team supervisor managed our work was eye-opening. When briefed by us, he was able to glean insights from the research and analysis we each contributed, and turn them into actionable tasks and steps toward reaching our goals. It was a terrific growth experience for me.
My internship at Honda R&D Americas, LLC helped me further hone my understanding of users' values and perspectives. It also deepened my appreciation of the importance of defining the problem space and target audiences and supporting those conclusions with evidence before progressing forward. I was able to contribute my work and creativity to an effective team where great communication allowed us to achieve many goals and milestones in a short period of time."