Kyle Rosa - Honors Portfolio
For my first honors experience, I worked as the Information Services Intern for GMi companies in the fall of 2023. GMi Companies is a manufacturing company based in Lebanon, Ohio, specializing in marker boards, poster boards, and trophy cases. As the Information Services Intern, I worked closely with the IT department to make changes to their existing database. This job saw me involved in a variety of tasks with the company, whether it was changing the pre-existing code or creating new tables and pages from scratch. I had to communicate with the other members of the IT department constantly to ensure I understood what my tasks were and that I was completing them on time. This Internship allowed me to experience what my future in IT might look like, which was beneficial this early in my education. Overall, I did not find the work too difficult, and I felt that my education at UCBA helped prepare me well for this job experience. The class I took on databases helped me make sense of the structure that the company used to run their business operations. Also, my classes in programming provided me with the knowledge necessary to read and make changes to the code that supported company procedures. I was able to complete over 10 projects during my time at GMi, which gave me a good understanding of the IT department, the programming languages that they used, and how they ran things at their company. My advisor for this experience, Dr. Presgrave, helped me stay accountable for my responsibilities in this position.
The first project that I worked on at GMi pushed me in ways that I was not expecting. What began as a simple code modification ended up becoming a large-scale assignment that would take me a month to complete. My original goal was to make a slight change to the way that the company freight codes are calculated, which would have taken me less than a day to complete. As I began to work on the project, my IT manager ended up discovering that the necessary changes were much larger than expected. Rather than moving me to a different project that would have been easier, my manager asked me if I wanted to continue working on it. I wanted to prove myself in my first internship, so I accepted the challenge. The first major issue I encountered was that the current freight code calculation process was encountering issues, causing incorrect freight codes to be sent to the shipment companies and delaying deliveries for GMi. This meant that my manager and I needed to find the problem and fix it to prevent slowing down the company. We eventually found the issue, a table that was responsible for matching each code to the correct freight class. This table, however, did not contain all the necessary codes, meaning orders were being placed with the wrong freight codes. After entering the codes, modifying what freight specifications each code corresponded to, and creating multiple code-units and pages to simplify the process, the project was complete. I am very thankful to my manager for helping me through the process every step of the way. Although it was stressful, I am very proud of the work I did on that project, and I learned a lot from it. Overall, working at GMi companies allowed me to get real-world job experience and solidify my desire to work in the Information Technology field in the future.
What I found most valuable about the GMi internship experience was my correspondence with the department manager. I was able to e-mail or call her whenever I needed to, which made completing projects and asking questions much easier. Because of this, I was able to walk away with a solid understanding about the role and the responsibilities that it comes with. I learned a lot about communication, as I needed to find a way to articulate the issues that I was facing so that I could get help. Being able to talk with someone who was very experienced in the industry helped me understand problems that IT workers often encounter, such as hardware difficulties or programming struggles. I grew to appreciate this level of communication more and more, especially as I took on more difficult projects. I was also able to take part in the monthly team meetings, during which projects were assigned and deadlines were set. These meetings gave me a glimpse into what I will have to take part in as a future IT employee for a company. I truly loved the team-oriented atmosphere at GMi, and I have no doubt that it helped set me up for future success in the industry.
