My second day at SAS started out with something very common in the corporate world– a staff meeting. Saavan and I sat in on the staff meeting of Lisa Vulinec. In the meeting sat Lisa’s team of around 6 employees and 4 interns. During the meeting, the team recapped a trip a few of them had been on to Vienna last week and then began to discuss various projects they are currently working on. The biggest project the team is working on right now is unifying SAS finance across the world into one efficient and effective system. They call this goal “One Finance. One SAS”. Interestingly, there are SAS offices across 60 countries around the world. Which means that the team at the Cary HQ is currently working to consolidate and unify all the finance people in SAS offices across the world. After the meeting, we were able to talk with Jim O’Brien and Heather who spoke to us about the way SAS consolidates all of their expense reports into an efficient system. They also talked to us about the technology used in finance today including a SAS designed financial software called FM (financial management). They also told us about the many different divisions under finance.
After that, it was time for lunch. We went to lunch in the SAS cafeteria with 4 college summer interns. 3 of them go to NC State while one of them goes to UNC. They began their internships in mid-May and will be working in finance the entire summer. We talked to them about a variety of topics, everything from what college is like, to what made them decide to major in finance. It was great to talk to them about their experiences especially because in only 4 years I will be where they are, having already selected a major in college, and almost ready to enter the workforce. After lunch, we got to learn more about the Tax and Treasury department in SAS. I talked to two Public accountants who work in the international tax field– Meg Deal and Adam Neal. They talked to me about the variety of things they do, including helping SAS employees all over the world file their tax returns and making sure SAS complies with all federal tax regulations. Meg and Adam also shared with me what lead them to be interested in accounting, and why they enjoy their jobs.
Finally, to close out the day, we met two more interns. We then had a round table discussion with the 2 interns and one of the interns we had met earlier at lunch. Mostly the discussion centered around college, and what lead them to decide to go into accounting and finance. Overall, it was a very informative day and I enjoyed learning more about finance at SAS.
