Day 2 in building T was packed with meetings! It was so interesting to talk to different people at SAS and learn about their journeys to their current career positions. One of the main trend throughout all of them was that the position they thought they wanted was not at all the position they ended up in.
The first think Niki and I did today was meet with Alec LePrince, a business consultant architect. He taught us all about the different sectors of the broad term “business”. There is truly a career position for everyone in the realm of business, ranging from marketing to sales to developer to educator.
After this, we attended the weekly Risk Management Business Meeting, in which Pauline’s manager attended from Maryland! It was really awesome to see how each member of their team utilized their respective skills to come and work together. For example, Tatiana, originally from Brazil, focuses on the more global aspect of the Risk team, while Pauline focuses more on the marketing aspect. They also discussed future project plans, improvements, and what they each accomplished that week. Through the meeting, we learned more about the internal developments of SAS itself.
After that, we had lunch with the Risk team in the Building T cafeteria. Although SAS employees say that the lunch here isn’t as good as the ones in Building A and C, the food was still phenomenal and we had a great time talking to Pauline’s team.
At 1, Niki and I had a meeting with Rani, a business consultant down the hall. She gave amazing advice about pursuing a business career. My favorite advice from her was
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- Sometimes starting out in bigger companies isn’t the best idea. It is really easy to get lost in the mix, and it may be hard to advance in your career.
- Find what makes you unique. Yes it’s important to get a business degree, but what will make you special? Is it digital marketing? Software engineering?
I look forward to use her advice when curating my path in the business world!
At the end of the day, we took on a small project. Our task was to research banking trends, specifically about AI in 2019. We utilized research from Deloitte consulting to summarize the biggest trends in the finance/business world.
These are some of the trends I found:
- For the first time ever in 2019, the use of data, artificial intelligence (AI), and advanced analytics was ranked first, replacing improving the customer experience as the number one trend
- Increase in importance of open banking and application programming interfaces (APIs) by organizations globally
- increase in importance of innovation
- increase in serving a segment of one: “Many banks have initiatives aimed at targeting demographic-based clusters such as young people, Millennials or older people, but some banks are now targeting customers based on lifestyles, values, aspirations, mindsets and underserved needs.”