Ellen Leggett: Let's talk a little bit more about the internship, or as I've now told you, we call it a professional development opportunity. Generally, it's very inspiring for me to work with these students who are all over the country. Lestarya and Jonathan are both here in California.
But we have students all over the country who develop an opportunity where they live. And in fact, it may be where they currently work. But it's not that we have a short list of companies and we just say call up this company and you'll get an internship. We actually really want you to use job-seeking skills, which we refresh for you in order to network and develop an opportunity.
And some students have gone abroad to fulfill this requirement. They have found opportunities in other countries which has been really exciting as well. But generally, the focus is on advancing skills in your current profession, developing new skills or facilitating a career transition for you in some way or a promotion.
And the internships are in all kinds of areas. Whatever your interests are is fair game for the most part, although it needs to be a business application. In other words, the kind of things that we may have said no to for internships would be in the clinical area.
If someone is, for example, currently working within a clinic providing services to, say, autistic children and they ask if they can use that for their internship, the answer would be no because we don't do any clinical work in this program. But a lot of other areas are open. Marketing-- across the marketing, consumer, organizational, HR spectrum.
So next slide. I want to say another word about the capstone treatise. As I mentioned, it's an application opportunity for you to learn what you've-- use what you've learned in the program, in particular, use some of your data skills.
This is a master of science program, so data is something we talk about a lot and we do expect students to have data skills. But how do you use those in the real world? It's very different from what you've probably learned in undergraduate psychology classes if you've ever had them.
And just to tease you a little bit, here are some titles of treatises that have been done recently. Brand Over Brain: What is brand loyalty? Looking at what we know about neurocognitive behavior and what it means for loyalty to brands.
A lot has been done by students on the issue of millennials. And The Race for Talent: Retaining Millennials, this was a very recent treatise. Comparing Use of Mobile Phone Apps and Happiness in China versus the U.S. We've had a number of capstone treatises that compare another country to the U.S. or are done completely in another country.
One of the benefits of being a virtual student is that you can actually conduct virtual research, too. You don't need to have people fill out surveys, for example-- just people that you can pass out a survey to. You can post surveys on social media and get international samples.
And lastly, Sneak Peek: Applying Principles of Persuasion to Increase the Appeal of Film Trailers. We always have students who are interested in the entertainment industry, technology, manufacturing. Any industry that you can imagine is relevant to this program.
So I think you can learn a lot more about internship and treatise by talking to our guests, though. So I'd like to, again, turn back to Jonathan and Lestarya and ask them to tell you about their internship and their treatise. And I'm going to start with Jonathan.
Jonathan, will you give us some background about how you came to your internship, which the slide is giving it away? It was at McKenna BMW. I remember very well your internship. And can you just tell us how you came about finding your internship and what you actually did there? And it'll be a good reminder for me too.
Jonathan Martinez: And thank you for the introduction, Dr. Leggett. I'm going to give a brief background or some background on my internship experience. During my final semester in the program, I was able to secure an internship at McKenna BMW, which is a dealership here in Southern California, as a human resources assistant.
Some of the duties that I carried out as a human resource intern were to assist with administrative investigations. I would conduct orientation and onboarding, also touch on aspects of employee relations, interviews, as well as performance management, and other areas that are related to HR, which is the field that I was interested in pursuing a career in.
At the conclusion of the internship as well as my graduate school program, McKenna BMW offered me a full-time position as an HR generalist at one of their newly acquired dealerships that's also here in Southern California, which is where I'm currently working at now full-time as an HR generalist. So out of the internship, I was able to secure full-time employment as well as a promotion.
And during my time as an intern, I would also serve as an internal consultant to any problems the organization may be facing. They asked me for recommendations, and I would offer my advice and recommendations on certain issues that were concerning the organization with regards to human resource policy or maybe workplace policies.
Ellen Leggett: Great. So I was just--
Jonathan Martinez: Also-- I'm sorry, go ahead.
Ellen Leggett: And I know that you noticed a particular business problem while you were there and that actually grew into a research study for your treatise. Could you tell us about that?
Jonathan Martinez: Yes, definitely. So during my internship there, the company had recently acquired a very, very large BMW dealership with about 220 employees maybe within a year time frame from me starting the internship. And the problem the organization was facing was actually assimilating the new employees to the newly-- to the company that acquired them, McKenna.
So that prompted me to focus my capstone treatise on, specifically, mergers and acquisitions in the automotive industry. Because of the acquisition that actually occurred, it was a real-world problem that the company was facing at the time. So my capstone treatise was based off real-world data, a real-world problem.
I was able to talk to and interview several employees from both dealerships, from both companies. And at the same time, I was able to collect data and analyze the data and recommend-- excuse me, and recommend my findings or the data I collected to the issue the company was facing.
And I offered my recommendations. So in the future, if this company ever decides to acquire another dealership, I hope that they would use the information I collected from the capstone treatise, which was how to assimilate or how to successfully manage a merger and acquisition in the automotive industry.
Ellen Leggett: Very, very compelling work and very relevant to what was going on in that company. And by the way, I see the slide that we have up here says Internship Presentation. I also want to mention that during the time you were doing your internship at the BMW dealership, we had a class together, right? And that was a class where we met online. And every student makes a presentation to all the other students about what they're doing in their internship, so that you had the chance to share what you were doing, and others in the class could learn as well. But there was also a lot of-- there were discussions every week that you were engaging in online with your other classmates during that semester, right?
Jonathan Martinez: Yes, definitely. I was able to communicate with other classmates during the course of the internship class. I was able to ask for advice as well as give recommendations to some of my classmates who perhaps had questions with regards to distributing surveys, or perhaps asking specific open-ended questions for their surveys or how they can actually get someone to complete a survey. That's one of the challenges that I faced during my capstone treatise, which was running coincidingly with my internship, was getting people to actually log on and complete a survey.
But part of what you learn as a student during the program is how to communicate, how to get that message across and connect with people in the workplace, and how to get them to understand that perhaps completing a survey isn't always a bad thing. It could lead to information that could perhaps possibly improve their workplace or the work surroundings.
Ellen Leggett: Yeah, very, very nicely said. Role of research in organizations is to help the organization. So that was a great experience. I'm going to thank you, Jonathan, and turn to Lestarya and see what your experience was, Lestarya, while working at Intel when it was time for you to do-- to come up with something for your capstone treatise and your internship. So can you tell us how you went about getting a situation that would work for you since you were already full-time employed?
Lestarya Taudi: Yes. So as Dr. Leggett said, I was already working at Intel, which is a huge company. And they are invested in a lot of different business areas. And so my goal was to look for opportunities to do research in which I'd be looking at the external consumers.
And so through a lot of informational interviews with people across the company, I identified a particular opportunity that caught my attention within the sales and marketing group and particularly within their influencer sales group.
Basically, out of the conversation, we were able to say, OK, there's a research need. And it was a really good fit. And the best part was that after getting support from my manager, I was able to split my time so that 50% of my time at Intel would be spent doing my internship in the sales and marketing group. So that really worked out well.
To share more about the intern-- what I was actually doing in the internship, basically, the Influencer Sales Group was working on the retail and hospitality vertical. And so in order to influence the ecosystem of, say, your big name brands that probably plenty of us on this call shop at, we have to do forward-looking research, either three, five, even 10 years ahead.
And so this team needs to be up to date on not just what's happening now but what could be. And that's where having a psychology background and doing research came into play. Basically, my main project, which also crossed over with my treatise, was doing consumer research to understand what's the consumer journey across channels.
So, for example, let's say, some people might do-- their shopping journey might start on the internet. But there's plenty of times where you want to go in store and try it on or feel the texture. Right? But then you may not even buy in store. You might go back home and want to purchase it. And you might look at other resources.
So there was a lot of data that needed to be collected about consumer behavior, their preferences, and be able to do it in a way that would gather data that could be used to inform Intel's direction and help really determine what should we be investing in? What kind of experiences would consumers want? And by means of that, then retailers and other brands would want to work with us to bring those experiences to life using our technology.
So that was a great experience. And really as a result of the research, they were able to take the findings and make some decisions, which I feel is very rewarding. And then also in addition to helping Intel, the fact that I was able to do an internship and have my treatise related to it was really a win-win.
And even the treatise that I ultimately submitted and got approved, I've actually shared that internally. And my director in that group shared it internally as well. And it was so great when he asked me-- he's like, when I reference this, how should I quote you? How should I--
[laughter]
And it was such a great feeling. So I think that was a great experience. And yeah, got to do it while working at Intel and got to do the internship and treatise in the same area.
Ellen Leggett: And my last question is, after you finished that project in that period of time, did you go back to your former position? Or have other opportunities presented themselves at Intel?
Lestarya Taudi: Yeah, so when my internship completed-- Intel is actually going through a huge reorganization. So I actually have some one-on-ones scheduled for the areas that Intel is kind of heading in. And so I definitely will be leveraging the work I've already done. So there are some conversations in the works.
Ellen Leggett: Wonderful. Great. OK. So that gives everyone on the line a very exciting introduction to the various ways in which students make this set of experiential requirements work for them. And thank you both Jonathan and Lestarya for sharing your experiences.
And again, Lestarya, while you were at Intel doing your internship and your thesis, I know that we talked a lot. And we had live sessions online to talk with others who were doing their treatise at the same time. And there was a pretty tight group of you all trying to get finished at the same time, if I recall.