My final week at Altec is about to come to a close . I will probably miss the people here the most. They are really great, genuine people. Altec does not have any open positions as of present to offer me a full time job. However, they are constantly expanding, and plan on having a position open for me by the time December rolls around. Honestly, I would love to work here. It’s a great place to be.

Many of my weeks here have been very educational for me but one really sticks out in my mind when I think about it. That week would be my last week here. I have learned so much over this past week. The biggest trait I learned is presentation skills. I presented the final version of my main project I have been working on all summer to senior management. Granted I had some great mentors to guide me, I feel like senior management was really impressed with my final product. And most importantly, I saved Altec money and provided a valuable product to their EDI administrators.

I love to work, I always have. I love the routine of it. But, thinking about graduating kind of makes my heart sink. I will miss my friends and all my professors. Thinking back on it, I’m kind of glad I ended up staying an extra semester. More importantly, I’m glad my final semester will be a fall semester (aka football season)!

This summer has been great! And when I say great I mean GREAT! This past summer has been one of my favorite summers to date. I have been very blessed to have this wonderful opportunity to work at such a prestigious company like Altec. So thank you, Altec!

This week I got to go to an accounting meeting with two of my business intelligence team members. I got to meet two of the head accounting guys at Altec and spoke with them about building an application to show all of Altec’s accounting records in Qlikview. That’s going to be a cool app!

One word to sum up my week: time management. I learned that I am going to have to manage my time perfectly in order to complete these three projects before I leave in a few weeks. The next few weeks are going to be a roller coaster of a ride!

One word to sum up my week: trial-and-error. I learned that you don’t always build a data model in QlikView once and it turns out perfect. It took many trial and error runs and many test applications open at a time to figure it out. I feel like it is finally starting to come along nicely!

This week I got to meet with the director of the IT department here at Altec. We sat down and she explained exactly what she wanted to see in my application as an administrator of the application. I also met the EDI manager here at Altec and he explained what he wanted to see in the application as a manager of the application. Both were super nice and great people to work with!

If I had to pick one word to sum up my week, it would be knowledgeable. I learned a great deal about Qlikview this week and also about what I am actually going to be doing for the next two months. I hope the following weeks turn out to be as knowledgeable as this one was!

Altec is a manufacturing company; producing cranes, chippers, and many other types of work trucks. I have done internships in the telecommunications field and the medical field, so I thought it would be cool to switch it up a bit and work in the manufacturing field.  Turns out I really like it! It’s very fast paced and exciting! My main project is to develop an application to show how EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) is used throughout the company and also to troubleshoot any errors within an EDI transaction. I am working with current data that changes every day which is challenging and exciting at the same time! I am excited to learn how a big company like Altec uses EDI in their business every day.

Finding a place to live in Birmingham in my price range was hard. Especially since I only needed a place for two months and no apartment complex would rent to me for a reasonable price. I live in Cullman, AL, which is about 45 minutes away, so I just decided to commute every day. I never realized how early 5:30 am was!

Sometimes internships are hard because you are only there for a short amount of time and once you finally feel comfortable, the internship is over. The first day and few weeks of an internship can be scary and overwhelming. I have had internships in the past that back this up! However, Altec was ready for me when I got here and had everything set up for me. It was nice to feel that warm welcome! The first few days I went through training on software they were using and just everyday life at Altec. I felt fully prepared to tackle the internship head on. It feels great to get up every morning and not dread going to work. It goes without saying; I am having a great time this summer working for Altec!

We hope that you had a great summer and that the rest of your year will be just as good if not better! Over this summer we had a couple of interns from the MIS program blog about their individual internships and what it is like being an intern as a whole.

Sometimes hearing the word internship can be daunting and you can find yourself asking questions like:

“Will I be prepared?”

“What if I say something wrong in a meeting?”

“What if I am the only one in my internship group that doesn’t know the information?”

Well hopefully in reading these blog posts it will ease some of the anxiety that comes with searching and accepting the right internship. Please feel free to ask questions under each post or comment about your internship! Hope you enjoy the series!

To the student participants: thank you for attending, competing in ideation workshops, and working with one-another during group activities.  The AIS Conference is about coming together to build successful unified AIS student chapters around the world, and this would not be possible without your drive to Be Exceptional.

To the AIS executives: thank you for your guidance, your insight, and choosing to host this year’s conference here at the University of Alabama.

The theme this year was strategy and value proposition for our Student Chapters.  Student leaders from all over North America came to present their strategies.  Representatives from Unum’s Innovation Division conducted an “ideation” workshop for all the students, randomly placing the students on 19 different teams.  Our first step was to identify common problems and opportunities between our Student Chapters, writing each on a sticky-note and posting it on the easel.  We then grouped the problems/opportunities based on category, and voted which idea(s) were the most Viable, Desirable, and Feasible.  The next step was developing our best idea(s) into an application that would increase student participation and overall success of our Student Chapters.  We also created a story board for our applications using user stories.  Our last activity was to create an action plan to implement the material created in the “ideation” workshop into our Student Chapters for the coming semester.  The workshop was incredibly insightful, challenging, and valuable for all the students that participated.

The value of our project is to make habitat more efficient in their business operations. Due to the fact that they are a non-profit organization they often have limited resources. By helping them run more efficiently we can ensure that they utilize their resources in the most effective way.

The main challenges that we have had are that our client is very reluctant to change his ways and also has a minimal knowledge base over commonly used software. He provides us with very technical requests but he wants the end product to not be very technical at all.

Due to the short timeline of the project, we opted to use an existing suite of technology to best address their needs. Namely Google Apps and Excel. After setting up a demonstration multi-user calendar; we put together a customized document detailing the setup and management of such. We are currently assisting our client with getting accommodated to the suite as well as making modifications as needed. In addition to this, we are working to consolidate numerous redundant documents into a central repository.

Sentiment analysis—also known as opinion mining—involves the use of natural language processing tools to determine the connotation associated with a block of text. It involves using a computer to assess whether a block of text (a Tweet, a movie review, or a news article, for example) is generally positive or negative. Once everyone on the team was able to wrap his or her mind around this concept, the real work began.

So far, our team has integrated not one, but two sentiment analysis libraries (Stanford Core NLP and Alchemy API) into a back-end Java application. We have utilized MVC and C# to construct a front-end GUI application and created a customized RESTful web service to communicate between these back and front-end applications. An underwriter can search for a potential client company in the GUI, and, in less than a minute, receive a list of recent news articles pertaining to that company. Specifically, this list contains each article’s title, URL, content, and sentiment score; additionally, it holds an overall sentiment score for the company (which is the average of the article scores). Ultimately, this application will add value to Unum by expediting, standardizing, and increasing the objectivity of its potential client company assessment process.