MIS - College of Business, Oregon State University

Internships

Note as of August 2007: For the last couple of years, we have seen a dramatic jump in interest from employers in internships ... to a point of creating an imbalance: more companies wanting interns than we have qualified students.
-- Dave Sullivan, MIS Option Coordinator

To learn more about current internship offerings, please visit the College of Business Internship Postings for updated internship listings.

Alternatively, several MIS students each year get internships through the MECOP program. This link leads to the overall MECOP website, and this link describes the sort of MIS internships the MECOP program typically offers.

This rest of this page describes a few of the many projects and internships that MIS students have done to supplement their studies.

Kevin Berry - Nike
Dan Bowers - Weyerhaeuser
Corey Chan - College of Business
Ariel Chavan - Weyerhaeuser
Liz Farricker - College of Business
Teresa Furnish - Teach Engineering, College of Business
Mark Helmick - POP Direct
John Hopkins - Business Solutions Group
Brian Kovach - National Science Digital Library
Will Vanlue - Teach Engineering, College of Business
Cody White - Sybase


	Kevin Berry Nike Job Affiliation: Business System Analyst for Nike at World Headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon. Responsibilities: Worked in the Product Creation IT department on various projects. My main assignment for the summer was to create a data dictionary for their PDM applications. I also did work on site maps, use case matrixes, and QA testing. I was also involved in consumer research focus groups for the upcoming apparel line. Back to the top.

	Dan Bowers Weyerhaeuser During my internship, I helped to put together information from different systems, using various tools, to help achieve business goals. I think the best feeling I had was after a full day of troubleshooting, when I was able to get the numbers from our two queries (one from SQL and one from SAP) to match; meaning that we had built all of the connections and the transformations on the data correctly. I had some fun too! The interns beat the mentors/supervisors in the Weyerhaeuser Olympics, and I helped to decorate Amanda's and Brent's cubes for their birthdays. Back to the top.

	Kevin Berry Nike Job Affiliation: Business System Analyst for Nike at World Headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon. Responsibilities: Worked in the Product Creation IT department on various projects. My main assignment for the summer was to create a data dictionary for their PDM applications. I also did work on site maps, use case matrixes, and QA testing. I was also involved in consumer research focus groups for the upcoming apparel line. Back to the top.

	Corey Chan Student Support Tech II College of Business Computing Resource Center Description: I’ve been working at the College of Business helpdesk as a student technician since I was a sophomore at Oregon State University. I’ve gained experience in system administration tasks such as network maintenance, information system security, and customized technical support. Not only have I developed important technical skills, I’ve gained a level of professionalism that will help me as I start my career. My internship has given me a chance to apply and better understand what I learned in MIS classes such as BA479 -- business telecommunications and networking. In addition to learning to interpret and respond to technology related problems, I have improved my personal and electronic communication skills. Clear communication is always important; but it a special challenge for IT professionals who want to make a difference. My work has given me a leg up as I prepare to step out of OSU and into the future. Back to the top.

	Ariel Chavan Weyerhaeuser Description: My 'hello world' project at Weyerhaeuser involved planning, designing, developing and implementing the intern system workflow. It encompasses a wide range of BPM (Business Process Management) tools, giving me a great knowledge-base to take onto new projects. I worked with an enterprise-wide content management system called FileNet and used the Process Designer to develop workflows in order to automate business processes. Other work that I worked on included redesigning an old BPM project and also a workflow that standardizes our new project folder structure. One cool thing I did was incorporate eForms into the Intern Program to help automate the workflow. A key experience for me was learning how to implement eForms and step them through multiple users and how to escalate work within the eForm if the work isn't completed on-time. Back to the top.

	Liz Farricker Business Analyst Business Solutions Group (BSG) Job Affiliation: Business Solutions Group (BSG), College of Business Responsibilities: My primary responsibility is being a liaison between the developers, QA Testers, and customers. In my work I have had a chance to apply what I have learned in the MIS program to real projects for real clients. What I learned during the Hitachi Consulting project in Dr. Reitsma’s class has been especially useful as I help develop, document , and deploy systems that meet business and system needs. Being taught concepts in class is one thing, but actually applying them in real-life situations provides practical experience and looks great on a resume. Back to the top.

	Teresa Furnish Teach Engineering College of Business Description: On this internship, I worked with Teach Engineering on the OSU campus. Teach Engineering is a digital library located at www.teachengineering.org that provides curriculum, lesson plans and activities for teachers of engineering, and anyone else with an interest in helping students gain competence in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math. It is a collaborative project involving five universities across the United States. OSU's open source lab hosts the Web site and the College of Business provides development and maintenance. I worked with individuals from OSU, as well as from New York, while developing parts of a Web site I ordinarily would never see. I began the summer with limited knowledge about programming and little experience with database and Web interactions. I ended the summer feeling competent about my programming skills and with practical experience creating, populating and maintaining a database. One of the other benefits I received from my summer work is the experience of working on a real-world project with users and creators who have a strong interest in seeing the Site grow and move to the next level. It was different from class work in that there was not and never will be a finish line. The project may change over time but the team will continue building and improving on the work we did this summer. Back to the top.

	Mark Helmick POP Direct Description: I worked at a package consulting firm called POP-Direct. POP-Direct is a small startup located in downtown Portland that specializes in graphic design, structural design, branding, prototyping, and supply chain management of product packaging. While working there I learned the basics of package design, development, and engineering. I also quoted material prices between Chinese manufacturers and our clients like Leatherman, Nike, and Radio Shack. Back to the top.

	John Hopkins Business Solutions Group I worked as a student programmer in the BSG department down in the basement of Bexell. I worked on getting better acquainted with the .net platform as well as expanding my knowledge in XML and XSLT. I participated in a project that help to give the new look and feel to the COB home page by altering the XSLT file the outputs the look and feel of the page. I learned many new things and I'm continuing to work in the BSG throughout the school year and hope to learn much more. Back to the top.

	Brian Kovach National Science Digital Library Brian and Sarah worked full time this summer with Dr. Rene Reitsma (COB-MIS) and a consortium of 4 other universities (University of Colorado at Boulder, Colorado School of Mines, Duke University and Worcester Polytechnic Institute) on the development of a web-based digital library of K-12 mathematics and science curricula. The system uses open source, platform-independent tools, languages and third party software and is implemented on Linux. The project is funded by the National Science Foundation's National Digital Library Program. Back to the top.

	Will Vanlue Teach Engineering College of Business I worked on TeachEngineering.org (TE), a digital library of K-12 math & science curriculum. TE's curriculum is all aligned to state and national educational standards. One of the things I worked on was migrating TE's collection of curriculum from a database of educational standards that only contained four states to a database containing all 50 states. Doing this required that I draw on my knowledge of relational databases and internet technologies. The new database of standards contained substantially more information than the previous one, so it was important to design the database structure carefully so that it will perform efficiently even when we're searching through large sections of data. Back to the top.

	Cody White Sybase During the summer I interned for Sybase in Dublin, CA. I worked in the AvantGo department which was purchased by Sybase about three years ago and is a subsidiary of iAnywhere Solutions. AvantGo is the world's largest mobile service provider for PDA and Smart phone devices. We mobilize content for major brands such as: The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, USA Today and The Washington Post just to name a few. Our Service currently delivers over 1,200 mobile media websites to an audience of over 7 million unique mobile subscribers. I have been working in the marketing and data analysis departments. My summer duties have included: forecasting current trends for the wireless industry and AvantGo user base, creating reports and presentations for the marketing department, business development and brand extension, media/advertising sales and customer account management. Back to the top.

MIS Department - College of Business - Oregon State University