Colleen Pikus, Overland Park Police Department Intern, Accounting
My internship with the Overland Park Police Department
has been an amazing experience. My roles have mainly been to focus on learning
and observing. I don’t have many day-to-day responsibilities due to all of the
safety and privacy regulations that govern the department.
During my internship, I participated
in the police officer’s fitness test, fire arm training, shooting firearms,
police car simulators and defensive tactics. I
rode along with the traffic officers, who deal with all types
of traffic violations such as speeding, failing to yield, and accidents. I experienced COPPS which stands for “Community
Oriented Public Policing” and those officers are responsible for building
relationships throughout the community. In the latter half of my internship I experienced the Patrol Unit and CAU or Criminal Analysis Unit. CAU was my favorite unit because they get to help
the team understand financial crimes, property crimes, and persons’ crimes
throughout the whole city. In my future, I could see myself working with the financial
crimes unit so it was obviously very interesting to work with them.
This
photo was taken during my week participating in the traffic unit of the
Overland Park police department. During my week with traffic I experienced the
police officers giving out traffic ticket violations, dealing with crashes, and
also dealing with intoxicated drivers. This is only one unit out of several
units in the Overland Park police department. In this photo a Police Officer
convinced me to get a photo on one of Overland Parks new traffic motorcycles. I
learned so much about traffic safety and received a lot of valuable advice from
the police officers in the traffic unit.
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Tahnee Cooper, Commerce Bank Data Analytics Intern, Applied Mathematics & Psychology
Hi, my name
is Tahnee Cooper and I’m an applied mathematics and psychology major. I am
currently an intern at Commerce Bank in the Enterprise Analytics and Business
Intelligence department. I sought out an internship because of the gap between
learning about data in the classroom and actually working with data in the
industry.
This internship has been an eye-opener
for me in terms of what I thought the world of data looked like. The majority
of time is spent on cleaning up data sets and interpreting what the line of
business is actually wanting. The hardest obstacle I have had to overcome is
learning not only a new program (SAS) but learning an entire new industry:
banking. If I had one piece of advice to offer, it is to never stop asking
questions. There is no shame in not knowing the answers; in fact, it should be
expected that you don’t know all the answers as an intern. Asking questions
shows that you are engaged and have motivation.
In addition, don’t be too hard on
yourself—it can be easy to focus on the skills you are lacking because of a new
environment but you have to recognize your strengths, too. I was pleased that
in a meeting with my mentor, a trait that I thought I needed to improve on was
the trait that my mentor pointed out as one of my strengths. This leads to my
next point—ask for feedback. This shows initiation and offers you an
opportunity to improve. Aside from the data skills I have obtained, learning
the ins-and-outs of business etiquette has been one of the most beneficial
skills I have learned.
To close, my internship with
Commerce is to thank for the increase in my skills and the awareness of what a
good company consists of. Internships offer exposure to the “real world” and
offer valuable experience. Despite the difficulties associated with diving into
the big data world, the exposure I have gained is irreplaceable.
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Desiree Sandie, PricewaterhouseCoopers Core Assurance Intern, Business Administration
While the real work may have started during my second
week, the real challenges hit during my third and fourth weeks. These
challenges included adapting to a greater work load and to a new supervisor.
During
my second week, I was in the process of learning how to test interest income.
And when I say learning to test interest income, I mean I was just scratching
the surface. I hadn’t yet understood the why I was selecting certain
transactions from certain spreadsheets. Nor had I come to understand what made
certain transactions stand out from others. I had only just gotten familiar
with the different spreadsheets and how to manipulate them in excel to achieve
a simple answer. However, once the third week came around, I was suddenly
testing two different types of interest income for two different audits.
To
make things slightly more challenging, I was transferred from working under one
associate to another. The two associates had very different approaches to
completing their work and very different styles of teaching. The first
associate created a laid-back environment where I learned about the testing
procedures one step at a time. The second introduced a much more rigid working
environment where an explanation was expected to be given once and understood. Despite
my taking notes during the initial explanation of the two different audits, I
found myself questioning whether I was testing the transactions for the
different types of income properly. The briefing was so, I guess, brief that the
various steps to testing the different types of income became muddled in my
mind. I began to doubt that the work I was doing was correct, so I asked
questions. As I asked questions, I realized that my new associate was frustrated
with how unsure and confused I was. That frustration only intensified the lack
of confidence I had in my work. However, I continued to work and ask questions.
Eventually I realized that the associate wasn’t so much frustrated with the
fact that I was asking questions, but that there was a misunderstanding about
my level of experience.
The second associate had
thought I had more experience testing interest income. Therefore, she was
explaining the steps and procedures at a higher level without breaking down the
information to the basics. It took me a while to come to this realization
because I was working so hard just to understand what she was saying to me and
I didn’t know how to explain that I didn’t understand. Eventually though, I did
realize and I was able to explain what I didn’t understand and ask questions
that would help me progress with my work.
This learning curve of
adapting to a new teaching style while trying to complete new tasks took the
better part of two weeks to get through. And to be quite honest, I’m not fully
through the learning curve. I’m still working to understand the reasons why I’m
looking for certain transactions and evaluating them against different levels
of materiality. I’m not satisfied only knowing to pull certain base income
amounts from one spreadsheet to paste into another spreadsheet with a formula.
And I’m not satisfied with the relationship I have with my newly assigned
associate mentor/teacher. So, I’ll continue to work, better my communication
skills, ask questions, and build a better rapport with my new teacher, which I
hope will aide in developing my understanding of auditing as a whole.
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