May 29th, 2019
Today is the first day of my work experience at SAS institute of technology. Since I have never been on SAS campus before, I was amazed by it’s innovative and modern glass buildings. One of the things that intrigued David and me was the letters of the buildings. Building A was most recently built despite being the first letter of the alphabet. We would soon find out that the original Building A, B, and C actually turned into the Umstead Hotel.
We first began with an intro session lead by Ms.Woitkowski and Mrs. Daugherty, two of SAS’s University Recruiting Directors. In the intro session, I really got to understand what SAS is really about and how it is able to impact people’s lives around the world. We watched several videos including one that illustrated the destructive forces of a typhoon on the country of Nepal and how SAS was able to use data analytics to calculate the necessary resources for Nepal citizens to rebuild their home without causing damage to surrounding economies. SAS is also a really impressive private company. It returns 25%(compared to the industry average of 9%) of the revenue back into research and development to create the next best thing. SAS is also used by 96 of the Fortune 100 companies. One other thing I learned was how enjoyable it is to be a SAS employee.
After the intro session, we headed downstairs to the cafeteria for lunch. SAS offers some of the most delicious foods at cheap prices for their employees. I thought about what I should get for a very long time of 20 seconds and realized that pizza is the only correct move. After Lunch, we split up into our individual sessions. I headed over to the department of research and development with Mrs.Holland, who was a software engineer that worked on customer intelligence testing. She first briefed us on an overview of how her department ran and then introduced us to some of her co-workers. At the end of the session, she actually showed us how she is able to do some of her testing on the SAS web application. After the first day, I have only gotten more and more curious research and development.
