My Experience with Organizations
I have been is several
organizations, some related to school and some companies through internships
and Co-Ops. Each having a different type of culture and many of which have
undergone change either when I was a part of the organization or recently
before or after I have left the organization. It was interesting to see how
each organization dealt with change and the reasons for the change of each
organization. Some changes were dues to a common interest, specifically the
organization I was involved with on campus. Others changes were made solely made
on a cost and profit/ revenue basis, mainly the companies that I have interned
or Co-Op for in the past.
One of the first organizations that
I was involved in on-campus was called Illinois Biodiesel Initiative. The I
first joined the organization is was restarting from taking a hiatus of 5 years
due to loss of interest and building space provided by the university. There
was a loss of interest in people for the organization because the University
was renovating the building that they were located in and they could not relocate
their equipment. Because many of the members were mainly in the production side
of the group a lot of them became bored and left. When the restart happened, there
were only 8 people in the RSO and they were eager to get the group running
again. The costs of restarting the organization was a lot of time relocating
the equipment to the new space on campus and time apply for grant funding to buy
new equipment. This required lots of dedicated people to help regrow the club
and to try and recruit new members. Now the organization is thriving with more
than 50 members involved and 5 different areas of focus within the group.
Another organization I was a part
of was for a Co-Op at Ashland LLC a specialty chemicals company. The recently went
through a change with spin-offs of their oil business, spinning off companies like Marathon
and Valvoline and acquiring specialty chemical companies like International
Specialty Products (ISP) and Hercules Chemicals. I was working at an old ISP
plant and many of the members still said they worked for ISP. Several of the older
members were displeased with the new ownership, while the new members really
liked the transition. Ashland wanted to move away from the oil industry because
they were in that industry for years and created subdivisions that they saw
were able to be sustainable on their own. They also acquired a lot of specialty
chemicals companies because of the booming market in pharmaceuticals and they
wanted to provide intermediates in those industries to try and stay relevant.
The last company that I interned
for over the summer was called Louis Dreyfus Commodities and they recently just
started buying and renting commodity production plants to compete with other
companies in the industry like Archer Daniel Midland (ADM), Bungee, and Cargill.
The reason they did this was because they wanted to increase their profits and
make themselves relevant in production as well as a commodities trading
company. The environment at the plant I worked at was a lot different than
other companies I have worked at before. You could tell that there were a lot
of new engineers that were hired right out of college. It seemed like the plant
was a bit understaffed. There were some older engineers in management
positions as well from other companies in the industry. Overall, the plant was
still thriving and many people were working very hard to keep the production
number high.
From all of the experience at the
companies and RSOs I was in, I have learned the different environments and
cultures when a plant goes through change. I realized that the culture differs
mainly on the reason an goal of the change.
Your strategy in responding to the prompt was to list a variety of your internship/coop experiences and then write a brief description about each of them. I wonder why you did that rather than stick with just one experience and elaborate on that. If such a choice comes up for you in future posts (or even in response to my comment on this post) I encourage you to try getting deeper into one experience. I will give some suggestions on how to do that below. But given the approach that you did take, I'm curious about the following. I'm under the impression that internships serve as a trial period for both the intern and the company as to whether a more permanent relationship after the intern graduates is worthwhile. Did you see these experiences as possibly offering a career for you? And, if so, did you try to return to the same company the following year? If returning to the company was not in the cards, right from the beginning, I would consider that a summer job, even if it is labeled an internship. You might comment on which it was in your case.
ReplyDeleteYou also took the perspective about focusing more on the company overall and less about your own experience. So your posts reads as very hands off in style. It would be good to read about what you did in the internship, what you learned from that, and how it impacted your future thinking. All of that would have made the post richer.
If writing about some of this is painful, because the experiences didn't go as well as you had hoped, I can understand that. But sometimes it is necessary to do a post mortem on a painful experience, to better learn from it. And I believe in the setup we have for this class you are safe in doing so - it won't impact your future employment at all. So drilling down into your experiences is what you should strive for in subsequent posts.
Below is a more in-depth response.
DeleteThanks for your response. In order to answer your questions there was potential to return for both internships and return offers were made to return to the Co-Op for another term and a full-time position from Louis Dreyfus was offered after the summer internship. I think the reason I did not go deep into these experiences is because I feel like they should be part of my past and stay part of my past. As I have said before I have switched out of chemical engineering and a lot of it was because of my past experiences with working at these companies. I think part of me does not want to let go but the rest of me fells like I need to let go. I am still applying to jobs in chemical engineering because I feel like that is all I know how to do. You have made a good point about talking about something painful so I will tell you about a transition I was apart. Though this story focusses on one organization the real transition that occurred was one within myself, one that has flipped my life 360 degrees.
ReplyDeleteIt all started when I got a phone call one night after applying vigorously to summer internships and Co-Ops the following summer. The man on the phone was from Ashland LLC and he wanted to conduct a phone interview right then and there. So I answered a few questions after that he said I would hear back from them within a couple of day. That Friday I got a phone call with the offer for a Spring Semester Co-Op and I was so ecstatic, I thought this will definitely make me stand out when applying for full-time and maybe companies will not care so much about my bad grades in Chemical engineering and would value the experience I would have. The Co-Op was in the Calvert City, KY which is a town of 1,00 people and the two near town were around 30 miles away with around 15,000 to 30,000 people. I was excited to finally move out of Illinois and move to a more southern state. Growing up republican I thought being in the south is the place I need to be. There was one problem though, the semester I received the offer I spend most of it applying to internships and was not focusing on my classes. It also happened to be the one of the hardest course loads to take as a chemical engineering student at the university. I ended up failing a class and going on probation that semester but at the time I didn’t really worry about it that much because I had a Co-Op and experience in engineering usually leads to a job in engineering. I felt like learning Chemical Engineering in the classroom was useless because every professor will say assume this or that to solve the problem, but in the real world you cannot assume those assumptions. So this was my mentality at the time and I figured that once I got experience all my problems would kind of just disappear.
ReplyDeleteAfter three anxiety filled weeks of break of trying to petition to stay in the university, it was time for me to start my Co-Op. I decide to stay with another Co-Op and we lived In Murray, KY because it was a university town and Calvert City was a 40 minute drive away with only about 1,000 in population. The other Co-Op was very quiet and I am a very outgoing person so we ended up not really becoming friends. On the first day of the Co-Op I was horribly stressed because it was all orientation, meeting the engineers on my team, and setting up my computer. There was really no direction on how to set up my computer. IT at the company was dreadful, it took me about two weeks to fully set up my computer and I would never turn it off because the load time would take about an hour to start back up again. Some of the worst days was when my computer would auto-update and for the rest of the day I was unable to complete any of the tasks.
For my Co-Op my cubicle was right outside of my boss’s office and I felt like he was watching my every single move. My boss seemed like a nice guy when the conversations were not work related but when it came to work he was brutal. He was very sort tempered and would yell at the engineers on my team if they made any mistakes. I remember him yelling at one of the engineers on our team for about 2 hours. Ever since them I was always on time twos trying to please him, but no matter how good of a job I thought I did he would always try to find something wrong with it. If there wasn’t anything wrong he would say nothing and give me the next project. I was working more than the rest of the Co-Ops, working 50 to 60 hours a week as compared to 40 and I would not get paid overtime because my boss would never approve it. I remember I was given a task by engineer on the team to get a sample and he wrote the wrong sample number down, but at the time I thought it was correct. The next day my boss got of the phone and started yelling at me in my cubicle that I got the wrong sample and to get the right one asap. The engineer who assigned that to me was not even there on that day and I remember him laughing when I told him what happened. That was usually the vibe of my boss throughout the whole term and you could see the engineers on the team were somewhat afraid of him as well.
The engineers on my team were overall nice in general. One of them was very weird and invited me on his boat the first week of the internship. The man on the phone that hired me seemed pretty fun but after talking around I found out he hired me last minute because the initial Co-Op accepted another job somewhere else. I also speculated that the only reason he hired me was because he also went to a big ten school and he wanted his son to go to the University of Illinois for chemical engineering as well. Overall, the engineers at the plant seemed pretty nice but the operators were very mean. They viewed engineers as hire ups they would “joke around” with the Co-Ops. After working there for 2 months I started to noticed that everyone liked to gossip about everyone else. The southern hospitality lost its charm for me and I became paranoid because I thought they were gossiping about me as well. After the term ended I was given an offer to come back in the next term. I accepted abut during the summer I had a “mental breakdown.” Instead of going back I went back to school because I felt like I was going to have a horrible time back there. When I came back the probation requirements started to seem unrealistic and I dropped out of chemical engineering in the middle of the semester. I felt a lot of emotions at the time but the biggest emotion I felt was a sense of relief. The transaction costs for me switching majors was that I would have to stay here an extra year I a lost most of the scholarship money I had when I first started. But I gained a clearer mind and I was able to still get internships in chemical engineering. Right now I am applying to Chemical engineering jobs, as well as business jobs but I feel like I would like to take a business position in a manufacturing company located in a large city. One of the jobs I am interviewing for right now is an engineering sales position which I am really hopeful and excited to get. Overall, this whole experience made me realize what the “real world” is like and I feel like the next “life changing” experience I will have to go through I will be better prepared.
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