IBM Summer Experience
This blog post was written by Peer Career Ambassador, Julian Parra ’20.
Hi! For those who may not know me, my name is Julian Parra and I am currently a senior here at Babson concentrating in Finance. On campus, besides being a Peer Career Ambassador at the Center for Career Development, I have been a Delta Sigma Pi brother since my sophomore year, and I am a part of the Latin American Student Organization and the Community of Developers and Entrepreneurs. Throughout my time at Babson, I started wanting to work in a career within the intersection between business and technology.
In the summer of 2019, I had the opportunity to intern at IBM as a Business Analyst on the Enterprise Performance Management Team. I was located at their headquarters in Armonk, New York. Essentially, my team tackles IBM’s fragmentation issue at the enterprise level. As one can imagine, IBM has created tremendous amounts of big data throughout its 100 years of history. My team is in the process of consolidating this data into a single repository in efforts to standardize the information and get to that “single source of the truth” of data. From there, my team developed visualization tools like mobile apps of the single repository for IBM executives to get an idea of how their particular business unit is doing at a high level.
I focused on client data specifically throughout my internship. I interviewed roughly 25 IBMers from across the corporation to understand what projects they were working on that involved client data, what data systems they pulled client data from, and blockers they were facing. On the last day of my internship, I presented recommendations to three IBM executives, my manager, and the rest of my team as to what client data specifically we should be ingesting to help IBM become more client-centric in the long-run and develop more meaningful customer insights through our offerings. Through working in an agile fashion every day, I communicated with my team on the progress I was making and implementing feedback I received quickly.
Overall, I truly enjoyed my summer experience interning at IBM. I further developed my Excel, analytical, and communication skills, further solidified my interests in business and technology, and met incredibly intelligent and ambitious IBMers along the way. Please feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions related to my summer experience, IBM, or anything related to career development!