Last Day At Verizon Wireless

Yesterday was a sad day at the office, as it was my last day as an intern at Verizon Wireless Headquarters. First to recap everything it has been a great summer and a great experience for myself. Being an IT person, it was amazing to experience the other side of things as the customer working in HR. This also opened my views up to entire new areas that I would have never seen before. So I really enjoyed that aspect of this entire summer opportunity.

On Wednesday Melissa and I presented our experiences in "Town Hall" in the Verizon Center. The Powerpoint presentation consisted of an overview of everything we did over the summer and was about an hour in length. Everyone seemed to really enjoy our presentations we were even told it was one of the best presentations seen in the intern programs.

I discussed basically how I got here with a little background story about myself. Then I talked about my main project I worked on being the Issues Tracking System. Next I discussed the Error Reports that I helped work on and bring back up to date. Finally I ended my section with a brief explanation of PGP and how we would implement a secure email protocol for our communications with Metlife. I then passed the presentation on to Melissa and she talked about her experiences.

After she concluded her section I came back up and we explained some of the Intern Events we went to and how they impacted us. It was really great to talk about those because not that many people knew about all the things we did throughout the summer. It was real fun just to tell everyone how we contributed to Verizon Wireless and how great of an experience it was for us. We concluded by just thanking everyone that came that day because it really did mean a lot. Throughout the summer everyone helped out by answering questions and just having someone to talk to.

I did very well on my exit interview and got a chance to go around an say goodbye to everyone and thank everyone again for the summer. I really feel that I learned a lot more about the business world in general by this experience. I improved on my writing skills and just picked up on new areas and techniques on presenting information to people. Unfortunately the majority of my work is confidential and Verizon Wireless property under the NDA forms I signed. But, I have the knowledge learned working with Peoplesoft, project management software, and presentation skills that will never leave me.

Once again I would like to thank everyone over at Verizon Wireless for a great summer and making some great friends with my fellow interns. I would also like to thank the recruiters for getting me in the door, Rider University Career Services for helping me out with the connection, and my adviser for this internship back at Rider for reading this blog and keeping up to date. Thanks again I can't wait to get back to school in 2 weeks and tell everyone about my experience.

The Big Presentation....

Well this is my last week here at Verizon Wireless HQ. I'll try and update on what has been going on lately.

Today we had a HQHR meeting introducing different areas of the company. Some presentations were made about different teams in the organization and what they do. It was interesting seeing how the entire process works for some departments and how they deal with different situations.

Yesterday I spoke with the Director of HR - Benefits to discuss how my summer went. I went over different things I learned and skills I picked up. We then talked about what could be revamped for future interns and how to improve the overall experience. I was told nothing but great things about the work I did and was greatly appreciated for my efforts. I also got a Verizon Wireless duffle bag as a gift and I thanked him very much for the entire experience.

The big day is tomorrow. Planned and scheduled is a presentation in Verizon Center's "Town Hall" about my experience and contributions over this summer internship. Since my other co-intern Melissa ,who is also a Rider student, works in Benefits too, our managers decided that we can present together. We have our Powerpoint ready and are making our final changes tomorrow morning. I will discuss first my experience and projects I worked on, followed by Melissa talking about her contributions during the summer. We should have about an hours worth of material to talk about and can be cut down if need be. There will also be a short Q & A section after we present for around 20 employees from all departments. It should be a great experience and I am very excited for tomorrow. I will post some of the slides up probably tomorrow on everything included in the presentation!

IT sets it straight....

On Friday I checked in with our contact at IT on what the status is with our project. The news wasn’t exactly what I wanted to hear. As an unofficial word, our Work Request has been submitted and passed through to IT. When a request is initialized to IT, the project is put into a queue, and we seem to be at number 8 in that queue. Unfortunately the projects ahead of us must be completed to get started on our own development process. When I asked when they expect our development process to begin I was told at the earliest, sometime in late September!

So I had to be the bearer of bad news to my manager and everyone else involved with the project. I tried to explain the reasoning behind IT and not just look at this delay as something severely a bad thing. Of course I will be leaving here on August 16^th to complete my internship but there has been much progress made already towards development. One of the most tedious jobs was gathering requirements which I accomplished early on. Also determining each user’s current process gave us a better idea on what we actually needed in this issues tracking system and what we can do without. Also developing a requirements document and work request were the final steps on getting the departments attention and get the ball rolling on development.

The worst was out of the way...almost. After the project was brought up and discussed by the HR directors and IT staff, they had a few more questions for me. They really wanted a better business case on why we should be developing the application in Peoplesoft rather than utilizing another available in-house software solution. HR and IT really wanted to explore every option we have before laying down into a set software solution. In my final weeks here I’ll complete the request and finally grab the spot in “The Line to IT.”

My manager thanked me for my contributions and assured me that my work has been a big step towards a much needed solution. She is even putting the project into her performance appraisal in the list of accomplishments for the year. Now I realize why every single thing I did was told to be documented somewhere and not to keep anything bobbling around in my head left unwritten. Because when I make my way back to school, the project must continue with one of the other team members available, and I’m not just going to be a few cubes away!