Each summer Consumers Credit Union hosts several interns to work closely with our staff. By the time fall rolls around and the summer interns head back to school, they’ve gained important hands-on job experience and oftentimes have shared meaningful knowledge and experiences that help us provide better service to our members. Check out this week’s edition of Money, I’m Home with Lynne Jarman-Johnson to learn more about the 2021 Consumers summer internship experience.

 

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0:00:04.4 Lynne Jarman-Johnson (LJJ): Money, I’m home, welcome in. I’m Lynne Jarman-Johnson with Consumers Credit Union. From finance to fitness, we have it all here for you on our podcast, and today we are so excited to introduce to you some really up-and-coming professional talent that we had the opportunity here at Consumers to have as interns all summer long. And we were just talking, all of us, off the recording that all of a sudden fall’s coming in, and I know every one of you are getting ready to go back to school. But we sure do appreciate everything that you’ve been doing with us, and we want to hear a little bit about your experience. So let’s start off, I’m going to start off with Aidan. Aidan, tell us a little bit about yourself and where you’re going to school, and what you’ve been doing as an intern.

0:00:50.0 Aidan Callahan: Hi. My name is Aidan Callahan. I’ve been an intern in the Grand Rapids market, both working as a Member Service Representative, and also helping out in the investment services industry, and I’ll be a sophomore at Michigan State in the fall. So basically what the… In terms of the Member Service Representatives, I helped out day-to-day tasks, answering questions for members and helping them with any task that they needed to do, and also directing them in terms of the TellerPlus+ machines, and also building that relationship across seven different Grand Rapids locations. So, I was primarily at the Breton Village office, but I kind of bounced around from office to office, and then I also had the amazing opportunity to work with Jesse and John, the Financial Advisors, and overall, it’s been a great experience.

0:01:45.2 LJJ: Aidan, that’s awesome. We’re going to head to Elena, and Elena, you are in ops, right?

0:01:51.4 Elena: Hi, my name’s Elena. I’m currently majoring in Finance and Business Analytics at Western. Yep, I’ve had it interning at the Operations Department, which was really, really fun. I actually went in not really knowing or expecting anything because this internship at Consumers was my first real internship, in an actual office-like environment, and so everything was like super-new, and it was like a whole learning progress, and it was really great. I worked really closely with Kyle, who was my direct manager, and Katie Warren and Lindsey Len as well, which were great people. We worked through some projects together. I felt like I got to know Diana and Jeff, we all worked at the Groves together with another intern, Sam. So it was really good. One of the bigger projects I did was just helping the Operations Department with building a forecast model to help them with just viewing ATM transactions more effectively. And a little bit about myself. Fun fact: I am an international student. Actually, I’m from Malaysia. I came to study in the United States about three years ago, so the internship at Consumers was a really great opportunity and a great experience.

0:03:09.8 LJJ: That is awesome, Elena. Jeff and Diana, Jeff, I’m going to start with you. You guys are both in Data, which has become something on the marketing realm, just an absolute no-brainer that we need such smart data. Jeff, tell us a little bit about yourself and what you’re doing.

0:03:25.1 Jeff: Yeah, so I am currently… I’m going to be a senior at Cornerstone University, which is up in Grand Rapids. My major is Data Science. Most of the time we are working with India Huskins and Tyler Grover in Data Analytics, which is within Consumer Lending. The first month was just a lot of learning. There was so much to learn just before you can really do anything. So there was so much to learn, and then after that, we kind of got into our main project, which was working with the repayments and debt collections, how that is set up, and we ended up making a better, more efficient way for those accounts to be sorted in the queue.

0:03:56.9 LJJ: Which really helps in Member Service. The thing that I find so interesting, Aidan, you’re up in front with the retail team. The back end of what we call operations, data, IT, some of the hands-on HR, I know Sam was an intern with us for HR, very back-end, but yet so Member Service-driven. So it’s very interesting. Have you found that, Jeff?

0:04:22.8 Jeff: Yeah, because what we’re doing is really just making it easier for people up front in the front end to do their job better, right? So we prioritize people that should be called instead of other people, so that it’s just saving everyone time and money.

0:04:34.8 LJJ: That is awesome. Diana, you’re also in the Data Department, tell us a little bit about what you’re working on and about yourself.

0:04:42.4 Diana Jimenez: Yeah, of course. My name is Diana Jimenez. I am a senior at Kalamazoo College studying computer science. Working with the data analytics team was a lot of fun, there came a lot of challenges with the projects that we worked on. There was a big learning curve, because the Data Analysis Department uses some pretty complicated software that I’d never been familiar with before. So kind of learning how to use Alteryx, learning how to create visualization for reports, using Power BI was definitely a lot of fun, but challenging to learn. But overall, it was super rewarding, and I think we came up with a really great end product with that repayments project. It took about almost like half our internship to complete, but I think we did a really great job with that. But aside from our big project, each… Jeff and I have been working on side projects as well, working on creating some reports, some workflows to get a better look at what our members look like.

0:05:42.6 LJJ: You know what is fascinating to me is to hear you all talk about your experience, because I just returned from an Executive Board Retreat, and there was a presentation during the retreat about your work, all of you, and we learned as much from you because of the insight and the knowledge that you bring to the table while you’re learning. Tell us a little bit about… Aidan, I’m going to go back to you, you’re going to go jump back into Michigan State. How did you find out about the internship, and do you recommend internships to others?

0:06:14.8 Aidan: Yeah, I would highly recommend internships to others for a couple of reasons. One, because it gives you that real-life experience onto how a company or how business actually works, and then I think that can transition very, very effectively back into the classroom, and you can kind of see how that conceptual knowledge relates to real world atmosphere, and then in terms of how I found out about the internship, so I was working pretty hard to try to figure out a way for myself to get an internship this summer. So I was reaching out, kind of cold emailing people, and then I also reached out to some of my connections with my parents, and my mom actually is a manager at Consumers in Grand Rapids, so I was fortunate enough to have an opportunity there.

0:07:13.2 LJJ: That is awesome. Tell me, Diana, how did you find out about this? Every one of you go to different schools and colleges, universities. It’s awesome.

0:07:21.4 Diana: So I found out through Handshake, which is Kalamazoo’s job posting site. So, I applied through the Monroe Brown Foundation scholarship and…

0:07:30.2 LJJ: Yeah, that’s a great foundation!

0:07:32.5 Diana: Yeah, it was amazing.

0:07:34.2 LJJ: Oh, Elena, tell us a little bit about how did you find out about us and what’s your plans?

0:07:39.3 Elena: I actually applied to the internship here at the year of 2020, but then it got cancelled because of the whole COVID situation, right? And then I was like, “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe this summer, I just want to relax. I don’t want to do an internship.” But Karl Wine is actually a really close friend out of work. I babysit his children, so he works there and he was just like there’s this… One day we had Thanksgiving dinner together, and he was telling me how great working at Consumers is and he moved down here from Southern Illinois and like Consumers like the best place to be working at, and I was like, “Okay, I guess… ” He just persuaded me and “I’ll just apply again.” I also know that Consumers do come to Western during like career days, just giving students job opportunities or just letting students know more about the company itself, but how I heard of it was just through a close friend.

0:08:35.2 Aidan: Oh, that’s awesome. Hey, Jeff, what about you?

0:08:38.4 Jeff: Yeah, so the way I found the job was just, I just found it online, like the job posting, but I have some family friends who work at Consumers and I was able to network that, just so I could learn more about the opportunity.

0:08:49.9 LJJ: Alright, so here’s the deal you guys, this is what I find so exciting. You truly are the future of what is coming into the workplace, there’s been such a dramatic shift in how people are thinking about work since the pandemic happened. Tell me, from your own personal standpoint as you’re looking to graduate in the future, what’s your thoughts about workplace environment and how strong is culture to you when you’re going to choose the next phase? Let’s start with you Diana.

0:09:21.0 Diana: I think one of my biggest takeaways from working at Consumers was actually how important culture is. You want to work around people that you like, sometimes I think we take jobs that, they fit us in the role or the position because you can do the job, but we don’t realize that maybe the environment isn’t for you. I think Consumers has taught me to really prioritize that as well, that we want to be in an environment that we enjoy and I really enjoyed working here at Consumers. I thought it was great people, everybody’s always willing to sit down and talk with you. In fact, I got to shadow a couple of people outside of my department, which was great, I got to learn more about the company as a whole this way.

0:10:01.8 LJJ: Aidan, what are your thoughts?

0:10:04.1 Aidan: Yeah, I think having a job where you’re excited to wake up and go to work every day is kind of the utmost importance, and I think that’s what Consumers was for me, working here for close to four months now, waking up and being passionate about what you do, and also helping people while doing it has just been a tremendous experience and I’m so thankful for the opportunity that I’ve had this summer to work not only with my core team at Breton Village, but being able to see different work environments, but how they all come together to do the job, they might not all do it the same way, but how you can do stuff differently and still get to the end result, so I thought that was super cool to see.

0:10:51.3 LJJ: That is awesome, Jeff, what about you?

0:10:54.1 Jeff: So before I started working here, I guess I feel like I wouldn’t have listed having a good environment to work in, like as my top priority. But I quickly realized that it is important, and I guess I hadn’t thought about that before, but even in the training, I remember the first day, they were telling us about how Consumers has one of the best places the work environments. And I guess I didn’t understand that or being able to see that over the past couple of months has really made me believe that it is an important thing you need to have in your work. And I would say that just reflecting, being able to talk to people and people’s willingness to help you learn and understand what you need to do to do your job, that was really valuable to me, and that was… I feel like that’s not at every job I’ve ever had before, people’s just willingness to help you understand things.

0:11:45.3 LJJ: It’s so important. My first internship was at WhatTV. I literally had to count raisins from for a Raisin brand, that was one of my jobs because there was a [chuckle] there was a reporter that was the consumer reporter, and we had to prove there was as many raisins as the Raisin brand said. And I thought to myself, now, what am I learning here. [laughter] But it was fun, I’ll tell you that.

0:12:11.8 Diana: How many raisins are in some Raisin brand? [laughter]

0:12:15.7 LJJ: And I can tell you that the percentage was right. They were absolutely honest, transparent advertising there [chuckle] so that’s what I learned. Elena, I love the fact that you told me the story about how you found us and did it prove true, was culture all of a sudden an eye-opener for you as well? It sounds like it was for everyone else.

0:12:40.7 Elena: Yeah, I think one thing that actually also really stood out to me, just working at Consumers, aside from work environment is very intentional relationships. Diana said people are willing to sit down and talk with you and even just saying like hello and asking how you are when you’re passing by. Yeah, so that’s really great. I think it grows a level of comfort that just makes you feel like you want to be at the office.

0:13:09.1 LJJ: Well, I’ll tell you what we want you at the office. [chuckle]

0:13:13.6 Elena: Yeah.

0:13:15.0 LJJ: I want everybody when you’re getting ready to graduate, don’t you forget to come back and put your name in because we sure do want to connect with you. First off, let me just say to Aidan and Jeff and Elena and Diana and to Sam, thank you so much for all of your hard work that you’ve done with us this summer, but I said it before, and I’ll say it again, we learn as much from you with the knowledge of what you bring to the table to tell us, maybe we could learn how to do something a little differently, but listening too, so congratulations to all of you.

0:13:45.8 Diana: Thank you.

0:13:46.3 Elena: Thank you.

0:13:47.8 Jeff: Thank you. Appreciate it.

0:13:48.7 Aidan: Thank you.

0:13:48.8 LJJ: Bye everybody who is listening. Thank you so much, I’ll tell you what, if you have anyone that you are interested in, send them our way as far as an internship, but also a podcast topic, we love that too. I’m Lynne Jarman-Johnson, and Money, I’m Home with Consumers Credit Union.