This week, most of the students from the MIMS class of 2014 are finishing up summer internships and preparing to return to South Hall for the second year of their master’s program.
We spoke with seven MIMS students from the class of 2014 about what they’ve been doing this summer, how their first year’s classes prepared them for their internships, and what they’re planning for their second year and beyond.
Priya Iyer
Customer Database Intern
Apple
Priya Iyer can’t really reveal much about her summer internship at Apple, but she does admit she has been working with Apple’s customer database, monitoring data quality and analyzing and improving the data. Her focus at the I School has been data analysis, data mining, and business intelligence, and she has been able to apply those skills this summer.
“This internship has exposed me to how data actually works in industry,” she said. “I could apply a lot of concepts from Info 290. Data Mining and Analytics with Jim Blomo and Info 290. Analyzing Big Data with Twitter with Marti Hearst.” The most important class for her, though, was Info 247. Information Visualization and Presentation, since a lot of her work has involved visualizing massive datasets and analyses using the course’s concepts and techniques.
In additional to honing her data analysis skills, the summer’s internship has helped Priya crystalize her career goals, or “completely changed my outlook towards work,” as she recently tweeted. In the past, she had felt torn between her interests in technology and business. “Working here and talking to a lot of people has helped me decide that I want to go into decision-support, where I apply my data-analysis knowledge and skills to analyze data for a specific business purpose,” she said. That newfound clarity has also helped her in selecting courses for her second year in the MIMS program.
“Overall, this internship at Apple has been a great morale boost, and a great career boost,” said Priya.
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Priya Iyer
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Corey Hyllested
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Eric Zan
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For more information and statistics about MIMS students’ summer internships, see the results of the 2013 MIMS Internship Survey 2013 (PDF).