When the daunting process of recruiting came around during the IS core, Eric Lee decided to take his own approach to finding the perfect summer internship. After looking at his options, he started applying and talking to nontraditional IT companies. He sought out companies that do not usually come to BYU for recruitment and applied like crazy. Before long, he landed an internship with Sonic Corporation in Oklahoma City.
At Sonic Corporation, Eric was assigned to the data engineering team for the summer. Some of his day-to-day responsibilities included gathering information from different sources found in the organization’s “data lake” (a “sea” of unstructured data) and creating jobs to automatically push information from one place to another. Eric was also responsible for creating Splunk alerts helping people be aware of issues and providing internal documentation of how to deal with those issues.
Eric loved the work culture at Sonic Corporation and his time in Oklahoma City. The leadership inside the company was always transparent with employees about how they were doing and improvements that could be made. Eric felt they genuinely wanted to help him out. He participated in training, activities, and companywide parties.
The IS Core helped prepare Eric to be a valuable team player at Sonic Corporation. No matter the level of technical skills an individual employee possesses, projects are often done with teams and these projects only work if employees work together to produce a great result. Eric said that IS 402, 403, and 415 especially helped him to be technically prepared to use C# and SQL at Sonic Corporation. At the end of his internship, he presented to stake holders about the work he had done and Eric was grateful for assignments like INTEX that gave him confidence in his abilities and skills to complete this assignment.
Eric decided to pursue IS because he liked both technology and business. When he found the Information Systems major, he knew it was a perfect fit for him because it joined these two passions. He also loves that he can learn how to make use of data for businesses.
Eric advises all incoming BSIS students to learn how to be a team player and work with others. During the interview process, employers know that students have the technical skills to do the job. What they really want to know is how well a student can interact with others. He also advised students to add projects to their resumes and choose an area of Information Systems to focus on. These skills and his internship helped land him an internship with Disney as a Data Engineer in Orlando, FL in 2020 and Eric is working towards his dream of becoming a data scientist.