The Bob Kays Internship Experience: Part 3

The ups and down-times of interning

So back as promised after a hectic last week. We got out survey launched and as of today, we have about 2000 respondents so we should be able to get a lot of information out of it. The survey will be open until this Friday, so we won’t be working on analysis until next week. (An interesting tip for people who are going to take the stats/market research classes (MGT 249, MGT203B and MGT285), in both of those classes, we used lots of Minitab and SPSS, which are two stats programs for analysis and therefore used very little excel. However, based on my passed job and this internship, it seems like most companies use excel and not these other programs, so just make sure you know how to do everything in excel as well).

I am writing this blog from work so you can probably tell that my week is going pretty slow so far(its funny because last week I was really busy, but this week so far I feel like I am just staring at the clock all day. Good news is I mapped out about 200 different combinations of class schedules for this next year and got my resume updated, so at least I got something done).

For the product development project I am working on, we are in some down time now. After the project update presentation I gave to my boss last week, I now need to wait for the next steps to develop in the project before I can go any further. As I mentioned before, the survey is open so we are just waiting on respondents, and I am waiting to meet this afternoon with the product manager I am working with on the portfolio analysis project so we can discuss the next steps in the project. Getting closer to finishing that project, we have isolated specific buckets of under performing products, so the next step is deciding what action steps should be taken to increase the profitability of the portfolio.

Oh well, until the phone meeting this afternoon, it looks like I need to get back to work (I wonder if there is a new Bill Simmons column on ESPN.com - a great sports/pop-culture columnist if you need something to read).