On September 13th, the 2nd year IOHRM students had the opportunity to present their internship experiences over the summer to the faculty and the 1st years students. Their internships were located across the country, including Michigan, Ohio, Tennessee, Montana and right here in North Carolina. Some students worked as human resources business partners, and were able to develop training programs, revamp an employee assistance program, create consistency across handbooks and policies, and troubleshoot international contracting within a unionized environment. The students were able to run data analysis on different organizational outcomes, like turnover, to identify drivers and make recommendations to senior leadership. Other students worked within organization development, training and development, global health and safety, and compensation, working on initiatives like changing company culture, creating evaluative data dashboards, improving a behavioral-based safety program to reduce injuries in a manufacturing plant, and redesigning an employee recognition program.
The second years also gave timely advice to the first years as they begin their search for internships. Some consistent advice was to make the most of networking and asking questions, to ask for more challenging work and different projects within the interns areas of interest, and to take the opportunity to learn, no matter the location or type of work you have been assigned.
Click here for more information on each student and where they were working this summer!
The entire program celebrated after the presentations with a wonderful cookout at the home of Dr. Yalcin Acikgoz, with lots of food, laughter, and some trampoline fun!
