My second day at SAS started out with a staff meeting. Erin and I sat in on the staff meeting of Lisa Vulinec. There were about 10 people in the meeting with a few more in a skype call. During the meeting, the team 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”. SAS is now worldwide and is in over 50 countries in the world. This 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. Technology is used a lot in finance today including a SAS designed financial software called FM (financial management). They also told us about the many different divisions under finance. Everyone is starting to use SAS software and even SAS uses their own software to work on projects.
During lunch, we ate lunch with four summer interns. We talked about finance and why they picked this area to go into. We also talked about college and they gave us some tips on what to expect in the coming years. They talked to us about what they do at SAS and what they are majoring in college. After lunch, I met with Michael and Lisa in the tax department. We talked about what they do and how they became an employee of SAS. Before I met with them, I thought that tax returns was small and there was very little variation in what you do. I thought you just did the same thing every day. I was mistaken, they actually do many things to keep the company out of the headlines and to move the company forward in their endeavors. After our meeting, we then had a round table discussion with three interns. We asked them why we interned there and they asked us why we were interested in business/finance. After thirty minutes in the conference room, we switched the subject to college. These interns also gave us advice and how we can make our college experience more memorable and meaningful. I learned a lot today and can’t wait to see what more SAS has to offer.
