The following was written by Ada Rohan, who is on the UGA Equestrian team. She is studying Management Information Systems through the Terry College of Business and had the opportunity to pursue an internship with Celonis during the summer of 2023.
This past summer from June through August, I spent my summer working for Celonis – a process mining company that works on business process improvement and removing inefficiencies from businesses. I was a part of their Raleigh North Carolina office along with 11 other interns. It was a rotational program, so I was able to be in two different teams throughout the summer. The first team was Services Enablement, second was Value Engineering.
At Georgia within my MIS degree, I learn not only the business side of things, but also the more technical side. Think of a computer science degree, but with a business school focus. The work I was doing at Celonis aligned on both ends of this which was cool to see and helped me better understand moving forward what I want to do within my career.
If you want to get down to the ‘cliff notes’ version of the last 10 weeks and my key takeaways from the summer – see below, and if you’re interested in hearing more, please read further!
Key Takeaways & Learnings:
- An internship teaches you both what you do want to do, and what you don’t want to do.
- In my case it taught me in what ways I enjoy being challenged, and in what ways I don’t! This internship (specifically the Value Engineering team) was more focused on the technical side of things and challenged me in that way. Moving forward I want to be more on the business side of things with less of a technical emphasis.
- People work for people, not companies
- My first rotation I had an amazing manager, who I adored. If she told me tomorrow, she was leaving and going to another company I would go work for her in a heartbeat. These are good people to learn from and have in your corner!
- I learned more about the world of sales (sales is truly a part of every role at Celonis)
- Although we all know the stereotype about salespeople, there is truly an art to how you ask questions and present information to customers which is difficult to master although extremely important to understand in any role.
To hear more about the specific projects I worked on within my teams, read on!
Services Enablement: Services Enablement was more of an internal role. The team’s role is making sure the tech consultants have the knowledge, tools, and skills to do their jobs. Whether this is onboarding, or upskilling, the enablement team helps get the right people the right information.
My Project: I created a proposal to streamline and simply internal communications through the use of a tool called Staffbase. I presented this at the end of my 5th week, and by the end of my internship they had implemented the work I put together which was cool to see. The Enablement team sends out a lot of important actionable information, and so the goal was to create action and not just awareness of the material. With this project, I was able to pull in my knowledge and interest in brand marketing and more of the creative/design side that I enjoy.
Value Engineering: In my second rotation within Value Engineering, I was doing more customer facing work. Value Engineers are responsible for the end-to-end customer journey. They are responsible for it all – whether it be giving demos to potential customers or framing and realizing value through utilization of the software, VE’s are the ones to do it. I was able to learn how to give customers demos for two of the core process areas that Celonis focuses (procurement & order management) and was able to take action on a project with one the largest customers Celonis works with in North America.
Overall – I am grateful I got to learn more about Celonis and what they do and what a job at the company would look like. Raleigh and neighboring cities were fun to explore around, with Duke and UNC Chapel Hill so close by. I look forward to what is next to come post-graduation in May!
