Business Student Shares Valuable Internship Experiences at Owens-Illinois

The BGSU College of Business undergraduate curriculum goes beyond business as usual.  Internships are strongly encouraged so students are able to obtain real-world experience and apply knowledge from their academic courses to the workplace.  This is the final narrative in a series about current business students sharing their valuable internship experiences.

I completed a 13-week full-time summer internship at the North American headquarters of Owens-Illinois (O-I) in Perrysburg, Ohio, and have continued a part-time internship with them this fall. I was part of the Finance Leadership Development Program (FLDP), which is a rotational program where interns and new full-time hires go through different areas of finance and accounting to understand more of the full scope of the company and see and experience different departments within the company.

The first six weeks of my internship, I was working with the North American Finance Department. The projects were overlapping at times which made time management critical. I worked side-by-side with about ten employees that all have different roles within the finance department which allowed me to see many of the day-to-day tasks that different employees within Finance have. Many of my projects included pulling different types of data from SAP and conducting a breakdown or analysis of the data. The data I put together helped upper management understand and make financial decisions. We would hold meetings after many projects and talk about my findings and the courses of actions needed to take place to help increase efficiency, cut costs, etc.

The next five weeks of my internship I worked with the Internal Audit Department where I helped guide four different internal audits the team was conducting. One audit took me to a plant in Oakland, CA. The last two weeks of my internship I conducted research for the Investor Relations Department. I was even able to sit in on a meeting during those two weeks with the CEO of O-I, the VP of Investor Relations at O-I, and an investor from a big bank in NYC. On the last day of the internship, I presented my research findings to the Vice Presidents of multiple departments as well as some executives of the Fortune 500 company. It was great for me to have the experience of researching a real company problem and breaking down data to then transfer over from quantitative data to qualitative data to present.

I would not have received this internship if I was not highly involved in the College of Business at BGSU starting my freshman year. I went to the job fair my freshman and sophomore years and networked with as many companies as possible. Representatives from O-I spoke at an Accounting Management Information System club meeting my freshman and sophomore years. After the second meeting, I talked to the O-I speaker and went to see him at the job fair a few weeks later and then applied for the internship.

As the fall semester comes to a close, I have been able to continue the internship part-time where I go up to the Perrysburg office a few days per week between classes, Beta Alpha Psi meetings, the College of Business Student Ambassador program and coaching youth hockey. I am interning in the Finance department where I have some daily tasks such as pulling daily data on the days I work, filing and monitoring different invoices from customers and also continuing to work on projects to help the company cut costs, increase efficiency, etc. I look forward to continuing a part-time internship with O-I through the spring and then full-time this coming summer to continue growing my knowledge on the company and also on the accounting and finance job field.