by ryan dawson, outreach specialist, temple university career center
Dow is a multinational technology, chemical and biological science company that uses its multi-platform approach to help address many of the world’s most challenging problems, such as the need for clean water, clean energy generation and conservation, and increasing agricultural productivity. Dow’s integrated, market-driven, industry-leading portfolio of specialty chemical, advanced materials, agro-sciences and plastics businesses delivers more than 6,000 technology-based product families to customers in approximately 180 countries and in high-growth sectors such as packaging, electronics, water, coatings and agriculture. They hire a number of majors from a wide variety of skill sets.
Name: Kevin Dang
Major/Graduation year: Management Information Systems, Fox School Of Business, 2021 graduate
What organization is your internship with? Dow (formerly known as The Dow Chemical Company) in Midland, Michigan.
What semester did you do this internship? Summer Internship 2019 (May 2019 to Aug 2019)
What is/was your job function and what does a typical day entail? I worked on the Employee Experience Services Productivity and Collaboration team, EXS Productivity and Collaboration for short. My leader was Amber, a service manager who handles the Cisco collaboration services. The project I worked on for the summer involved creating a dashboard with automated capabilities for the managers under EXS Productivity and Collaboration to view high-level metrics. This allows them to gain quick, actionable insights and greater visibility in order to determine the health of their services. An average day for me would consist of meeting with co-workers to gather data and/or learn certain processes, working with the data in Power BI to build out the dashboards, and attending intern events such as lunches with directors, site tours, team building exercises, and many more.
How did you find out about this opportunity, and what was the interview process like? Thanks to Temple’s IBIT (Institute for Business and Information Technology)’s IT Career Fair, I was able to speak with a representative from Dow and a Temple alumni who worked at Dow. Following this great conversation, I gave them my resume, followed up with an email, and eventually was offered an interview after submitting my online application. Given I would be working at the Dow headquarters in Midland, Michigan; I was given a phone interview, which went rather smoothly. A couple weeks after the interview, I was offered the internship for the summer.
How has your internship related to your course work? MIS is the incorporation of technology to make a business better. My entire team was oriented around this core concept. EXS for Dow is the Global Information Systems team that makes sure a Fortune 100 company consisting of over 50,000 employees worldwide can run as smoothly as it does leveraging technology. Thanks to the courses I’ve been exposed to and my professors, I came into my internship understanding how I could impact the company before ever stepping foot inside it.
What is the most important thing you have learned during your internship/job experience? I have learned so much about what it means to collaborate. The “New Dow” has been pushed a lot when my group of interns first arrived, and the new catchphrase they were pushing for us was “Seek Together”. Whether it was doing my own work or observing my peers and leaders, I began to really understand that no matter how hard you try, you will always be better off working collaboratively than being a lone wolf. There is so much knowledge and experience around you that the best thing for you to do is to be a sponge.
What piece of advice would you give to current students embarking on an internship/job search? Be passionate about what you are studying and what you believe in. Employers like to see drive and people who can bring their whole selves to work. Don’t be afraid to try new things either! I never thought I would end up going out of state for an internship, but here I am now, and I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything else. At the end of the day, you are more capable than you think you are. You will make friends, you will learn a lot about yourself, but most importantly, you will grow.
Did the career center assist you in any way, whether it was identifying the opportunity, applying to it, interviewing for it, or preparing for it? Fox’s CSPD (the business school’s version of the career center) provided a lot of great resume feedback and helped me stand out when I otherwise would not due to my prior lack of experience.
Have you learned any valuable lessons about obtaining jobs/internships during your time at Temple? Be proactive; jobs/internships will not come to you easily. Go to career fairs, talk to your professors, and ask your friends, every little bit counts. Get involved in student professional organizations that are relevant to what you want to do and grow your network. A school like Temple can provide a great education, but even more valuable are the opportunities that arise. Take advantage of them.
Do you have a profile on Twitter and/or Instagram? If so, what are your usernames? @kevinkhangdang on Instagram