Conner Paulson knows firsthand that you should never underestimate an opportunity to get your resume out there and network. Due to a quick conversation with a campus recruiter last year, Conner had the opportunity to work as a product management intern for Walmart during the summer.
In this role, he joined Walmart’s associate experience team and worked on mobile apps used by employees in stores across the country. The team’s problem was that employees accessed about 50 applications that had different user experiences and functionality. Conner and his team centralized the functionality of these apps into a single app with a consistent user experience.
Conner’s day-to-day activities as a product management intern varied due to the nature of product management. Often, he would have meetings with various stakeholders across the company including many in business, engineering, and design. Conner explained, “We have a lot of meetings with them so we can establish a single vision of what the app needs to be and make sure they understand what their individual contributions will look like.” Daily, Conner was responsible for understanding the concerns and progress of each stakeholder group, while making sure his team’s project was staying on track.
The journey to get this internship, started during his junior year. Conner went to an information session for Walmart Labs (the tech organization within Walmart) and was really excited about opportunities to join this group. However, after turning in his resume, he never heard anything back and instead had a great internship at a different company. The following year Conner saw a Walmart recruiter on campus and decided to ask about product management internships. An opening in this area had just been created and Conner was able to give his resume and hear more about the opportunity.
“It sounds like it was this one-off need that a certain team had for a product management intern and she put me in contact with the two hiring managers for that team. It was a really fast process, they were able to see from my resume that I was a good fit from an experience standpoint and then I just had a single behavioral-type interview where they asked me a few more questions about my experience and my mindset. I think Walmart having such a good impression of BYU students in the past helped a lot too. I had just a single remote interview and then they extended the offer to me.”
For Conner, Walmart provided a different experience than the startup he worked for the previous summer. As the largest private employer in the world, Walmart’s applications are on on a scale that most interns do not get to see. The internal application that Conner was working on was to be used by millions of people. This scale can bring some challenges and complexity to the work, but it is fascinating to see its potential impact.
When the pandemic hit in March, Walmart worked to provide their interns remote opportunities. Conner also liked that Walmart gives employees opportunities to do what is most interesting to them and the option to move around in their career as long as they work hard. “Walmart has done a really great job, even being remote, of helping interns understand the values of the company. They have done an online executive lecture series that have really helped me see that the values that Walmart has are something that I can get behind.”
The IS program prepared Conner in numerous ways for his internship. “It has been a huge help honestly… having a software engineering background, coming from the IS program, and jobs as a Web developer has helped me quite a lot with working together with the engineers on my team. I can speak a common language with them, and I feel like I understood where they were coming from so much faster than some of the people that didn’t have any software development experience.” His classes on data (SQL & analytics) were also very helpful because of the large data sets at Walmart, the need to work with data that is not clean, and the ability to communicate with the analytics team. “I love that the IS program teaches you so many skills in so many different areas because it has really enabled me to work well with groups across Walmart.”
Conner advises future interns to be prepared to be proactive in establishing relationships. With Walmart being such a big company, he often found himself needing to find the right person with the right information so he could make the best decision. “Be ready to create good relationships with people across the organization because it will allow you to work so much more effectively.” Never underestimate any opportunity to network. He also advises students not to underestimate the tech-heavy classes in the IS core, even if your goal is not to be a software developer. “Regardless of what job opportunity you pursue, having that background and that understanding will be helpful for you and will get you in the door with people in a way that is not possible otherwise.”
When deciding to major in IS, Conner realized that Information Systems is all about solving unstructured business problems with technology. “I really came to understand that focusing on those technology skills as well as the business mindset behind it would enable me to do some really cool things and help people in cool ways.”