Author: saavan_yerramsetty

I have had a great time at SAS and am so thankful for the opportunity to intern here for two weeks. Today started out meeting with a technical consultant at SAS. Melissa told us about her career journey, and what lead her to SAS. She noted that her favorite part about working at SAS was the people, and talked to us about what consulting really is. We learned that consulting is basically people paying money for your services. Since SAS software is so complex, as a technical consultant she works to help guide companies who are using SAS software on how to use and implement it. After we met with Melissa, we met with Rani our final meeting of the program. Rani talked to us about her role in alliance. She acts as a liaison between SAS and some of its partners, like Deloitte and KPMG. She told us about the variety of jobs she has had before SAS. For our final activity in Risk, we had a round table with 3 of the summer interns who we asked various questions to. We talked to the interns about what lead them to SAS, why they chose to major in Comp Sci and many other things. As we wrapped up our activities with the Risk department, it was time to head over to building A for the conclusion of the program. In A we met all of the other CA interns and headed downstairs for lunch. After lunch, we had the opportunity to present our Gather IQ videos to some people who build the app and who work in HR for SAS.

We began today with an introduction to the Risk Management division. We started off the day listening to a webinar about risk management sales. Pauline told us that SAS offers many webinars and live streams that any of their employees can listen for self-education. After this, we had the opportunity to meet with Kim Bentley. Kim is the executive assistant to Troy, the VP of the Risk division. She talked to us about her unique career journey and how she ended up at SAS. She worked on Wallstreet and has a masters in music. Her main responsibilities today include helping Troy with his travel schedule, managing events, and everything in between. After meeting with Kim, we went back to Pauline’s office. She had her weekly call with her team and boss via Skype. During the meeting, each of Pauline’s team members gave their weekly update on what they’ve been working on. Once the meeting was over, we headed over to R for lunch with Jess Mayo who also had 2 CA students shadowing her. After lunch, Saavan and I began a Risk Management research project during which we searched for current trends in Risk globally. We worked on this for the rest of the day and sent Pauline a document with links to articles before departing after day 7.

Today began our second phase of shadowing. Erin and I are shadowing Pauline Ashcraft who works in Risk Management. The morning began with a quick tour of building T and an introduction to what Risk Management really is. Pauline talked to Erin and I about the work she does which includes helping outside banks and insurance manage the risk they are taking on. She also works on the marketing side of risk and works to sell companies software that will help them manage their risk. She talked to us about her career journey and how she ended up in risk management. She graduated from NC State in 2016 and had worked at SAS as a summer intern in college. After the morning of introductions, it was time for lunch. At lunch, we met two of her colleagues, John and Tatiana. They also work on her team of people who work on the marketing side of risk management. They both told us about their career journey’s and how they ended up at SAS.

Since Erin and I aren’t very sure what section of business we are most interested in yet, Pauline wanted us to get to know many different parts of a business. She brought in one of her friends, Nick Davis, who works in Sales at SAS, to talk to us about his experiences. Nick talked about how much he enjoys traveling the country to talk to customers and make sales. He noted that while Sales can be a stressful division of a business, it is fun because you get to travel a lot and interact with people across the country. After we talked to Nick, Pauline had a meeting with her team about their plans for the upcoming month. We sat through this meeting for some time before we got to learn more about marketing from another one of Pauline’s colleagues, Casey. She talked to us about the intersection of marketing and sales and different strategies that SAS uses to market their software. She also talked to us about how SAS manages their marketing by measuring its effectiveness. They make sure that they quantify how many new customers a specific kind of marketing brings, in order to better market their products in the future. Overall, it was a very informative day and I enjoyed getting to see a new side of the business.

We started the day in building C as we all met together to discuss the video project we began last week. We all split up into our groups and continued filming on sites all over the SAS campus. My group came up with the idea to do a dance challenge as a call to action to raise awareness about the water crisis. We introduced some facts about the issue and asked people to give us more information. if they could not do so, they had to perform a dance move on camera. We had so much fun filming these clips all days and really enjoyed the creative input we were each allowed to include in our video. We had Papa John’s Pizza for lunch so that we could continue working through the lunch hour. We finalized our video as the day closed and we can’t wait to present it on Thursday.

Today we were introduced to building R. All of the Cary Academy interns were together also. In the morning and afternoon, we worked on something called GatherIQ which is part of the SAS curriculum pathway. First, we went through a usability test which tested us on if the website is user-friendly or not. We had to locate a few of the things on the site and then give feedback on if it was hard to locate or not.

After lunch, they split us up into small groups to brainstorm about a new tile that they will add to the GatherIQ software. We were given this task and have to complete it by the end of the day on Monday. We have to come up with an idea and then make a video about it to show to the people in the room.

We started the day with another meeting with Lisa Vulinec. In the meeting, Lisa met with people in HR and others in Finance. In the meeting they talked about something that is called headcount. Headcount is an area that overlaps HR and Finance. Headcount is basically determining how many people SAS employs and pays at any given time. Headcount is critical to finance because a company must know the number of people they are paying in order to properly account for their expenses as well as predict their expenses in the future. They showed us the software they use to count the number of people each manager is hiring in order to keep track of their incoming or outgoing employees and the expenses associated with them. They use a software called Workday to account for this. After this, we headed to the office of John Wilson. During the meeting, John and his colleague discussed the changes that are happening in the finance division and steps they are working on to make sure these changes go over smoothly. After sitting in on this meeting, we headed over to another meeting this time with Ashley Gatewood our original host. Ashley was meeting with Caroline, one of the summer interns. The finance division is switching over the software they use to process numbers and data. Ashley and Caroline discussed this during the meeting. They went over a powerpoint Caroline had been working on that simplifies how the changes are going to affect people throughout SAS.

After our morning, new went to have lunch. We had lunch with two interns Caroline and Luke Wilson. Luke is a cary academy alum and Caroline goes to Wake Forest. We got to talk to them about a variety of things from college to our time at sas. After lunch, it was time for our last two hours in the finance division. I sat in on another hour meeting during which people on Ashley’s team discussed training for SAS employees all over the world to help them become better acclimated to the new systems they’re planning to implement. Later, we spent our last hour in finance with two members of the Global Reporting and Analysis team, Lisa Vulinec and Alex Harrill. Lisa and Alex talked to us about what got them interested in finance and their past experiences in the workforce and college. They gave us some tips on what to do in college and which major to pick. It was amazing to see how the finance department worked and was happy to have the chance to see it first person.

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.

Upon my arrival at SAS, I was astonished to see how many buildings the campus had. We were kindly greeted by Christie Dougherty, who guided us to a conference room where she made a presentation about SAS. I was surprised to see that SAS is involved with many issues. Many companies use their software to do data analysis.

Lunch was not what I expected. We ate at their cafe, which had all the food you could ever think of. After lunch, We met with Ashley Gatewood. She works in the Finance department. She gave us an overview of the finance department and what they do. After hearing a small presentation on what her division was all about I had many questions. They emphasized the importance of collaboration and you could see it in their building because there were many conference rooms. SAS affects many companies in ways I could have never thought of.

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