'BSc Management: The internship experience

Here are some words about my internship. As I mentioned before, you will be able to read all about fellow students’ internship experiences and see their ratings and recommendations. From what I saw, most of them recommended going for an internship in a medium-sized company since the learning experience is best there. I agree.

I did my internship in a medium-sized German company that operates globally. The group is in the maritime industry and has ships, which was very interesting to me from the accounting perspective. 

Although I’ve already mentioned this, I have to say it again: After my first semester at KLU, I came to love accounting. Ultimately, I landed an internship in the maritime company’s financial accounting & reporting department, which meant that I would be involved with the financial aspects of the six-month report.

I began my internship in early June and as I expected, needed some time to grow accustomed to my tasks and understand the practical implementation of accounting and finance better. Do not worry – this is typical and nobody will ever expect you to be perfectly professional from the very beginning. 

I was tremendously lucky that my employer knew the internship was a great practical learning experience for me. I was involved in projects and had the opportunity to visit advanced training sessions (especially for SAP). I never endured a minute of boredom there.

You could say that especially in the beginning, my learning curve was exponential. Seeing the practical implementation of the theoretical concepts I had studied in class and realizing how vast the field of finance and international accounting really is, was a great experience and I am surprisingly happy to have spent my summer working instead of relaxing. 

I am now back to KLU and met up with my fellow classmates. They also valued their internship experience tremendously. Some even went abroad (I have so far heard from a city in Bulgaria and London); and others made it into the big consultancies.

Some of you might worry that the intensive track workload with no semester holiday and two internships could be too much, but I can assure you that the internships are an extremely valuable addition to your studies. They have even prepared me a bit for the upcoming courses. I was able to go on vacation for two weeks before lectures began again, which is enough to relax a bit. 

More soon!

Helen

BSc Management: The Internship hunt

Hello again,
The bachelor program at KLU comprises one or two internships, depending on the track you’ve chosen. They are 12 weeks long and usually take place during the summer holidays. Our internship hunt began last year, in November.

For a first semester student, finding an internship (to be more precise: a good, educational internship) can be rather difficult. Especially when you’re going for a bigger company with a name, the online application jungle can seem endless. I was once stuck in an application process that had 18 different steps and dragged on for a couple of weeks.

Starting early and being goal oriented is key.
But even if you start way ahead of time and fight through countless online application interfaces and assessment centers, the internship hunt can be frustrating without what we call “vitamin B” (relationships) in Germany. However, we get help to some extent here at KLU. The Career Development office, which also forwards contacts in some cases, will check your CV and application letter. You may also benefit from the steadily growing alumni network or older students who will post their former internship or working student positions in the student group.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, participating in the extracurricular lectures at KLU can be rather helpful. Some of my fellow students were able to land internships in their preferred department this way (HR at a big maritime company, for example). I can also recommend one of the career development sessions in the first semester. You will practice informal interviewing and analyze application techniques there, which makes the search much easier for the students who meet with department heads and have personal interviews.

Obviously, not all internships and employers are perfect, supportive, pay well and enthusiastic about giving students a practical education. To limit the probability of being stuck with a rather unpleasant internship experience, you can take a look at the internship reports of the BSc and MSc students from earlier cohorts. After each internship period (semester holiday), the students must report whom their employer was, which tasks they were assigned, how they dealt with them, what they learned, and their recommendations to other students who are searching for internships. Selected students will also present their employers and experiences to the new students. They are usually happy to give advice or share potential employers (and their contacts) with you.

At the beginning of my application process, I was only looking for positions in consulting firms or finance departments. After a while, I also used my former high school’s alumni network and was happy to land an internship in the Finance department of a big maritime services provider and one in a consulting firm. However, it took me – and, I assume, many other students in my class – some time to get there.

Here is another piece of advice: Tell as many people as possible about your internship search and use networking opportunities (also the ones here at KLU). Eventually, somebody will know somebody who knows somebody in the department or company of your dreams who is searching for an intern (and you will not have to endure the online application processes any longer).
Eventually, all the internship-seekers in my BSc class were successful. I hope you find this post helpful.

Bye for now,
Helen

BSc Management: The second semester - Electives

Electives at KLU

You might have seen an entry called “General Studies, Skills and Current Topics of Applied Management” listed below our fundamentals courses in the KLU brochure. I thought it might be helpful to talk a bit about this rather large part of the BSc program at KLU.

The curriculum, which can also be found in our online brochure

Management is indeed interesting, but at KLU you will specialize on a certain degree path and focus on one field of research.

No matter how much you love your degree path, from time to time engaging with a different topic – maybe something not at all or only slightly related to your major study – is enriching and challenging.

That’s why we have the opportunity to take electives, “general skills and studies” classes, which we attend alongside our main studies. For example, here is a list of the ones I have attended:

Semester I:

Business English (skill) - 1 ECTS

Excel (skill) - 1 ECTS

Semester II:

Movie Production (general) - 1 ECTS

Presidential Elections (general) - 1 ECTS

Self-Management (skill) - 1 ECTS

Word and PowerPoint (skill) - 1 ECTS

Business students attempting to create an animated film in Movie Production

You can decide how many electives you take and in which semester you want to take them (there are certain requirements concerning the ECTS) and of course, which areas you are most interested in.

In addition to these classes, the big “General Studies, Skills and Current Topics of Applied Management” module also includes CPDP classes. This is a career development program with a variety of topics like interview training, cover letter training, and CV training. If you are not quite sure about the field you would like to work in after your studies or where to do your internship, don’t worry. Ina  and Anne from the Career Services will support and help you wherever they can (and having somebody to check your cover letter or CV is worth a lot)! It’s also important to think outside the box when it comes to career paths, and getting to know your strengths and (not so terrible) weaknesses will help a lot during your internship or summer job hunt, believe me.

Besides these classes, we have the opportunity to experience guest speakers from major companies. My last “guest lecture” in that sense was from Beiersdorf (you probably know their NIVEA product line) – our speaker talked about brand line extensions, which was very interesting (and we got free samples). 

Some of my friends even used the networking opportunity after the presentations to land an internship while chatting with the lecturers.

We have a broad variety of events on campus, and I will cover them soon with another entry!

Bye for now,

Helen

BSc Management: The second semester

The First Quarter
The second semester is probably the most relaxing one at KLU, at least credit-wise. In the first quarter, we encountered our first marketing class: an introduction to basic principles and techniques focusing on consumer behavior, marketing research, and of course, advertising. Customer retention management also had surprising applicability to our everyday lives (especially when you want to purchase certain subscriptions a bit cheaper…).

The best part of the class was a simulation game we conducted over a whole weekend with multiple continuous decision rounds. Each group represented one player in a market for technical products and competed against the other groups in terms of market shares, revenue, forecasting, etc. Equipped with an interface and certain decision parameters, we made decisions on factors like price, forecasts, marketing spending and allocation in each round. 

 

My group’s extremely rational decision-making process, represented here

This practical application of the concepts studied in class was as challenging as it was entertaining and enriching. Since we only had one class, the examination week turned out to be more of a holiday (which I obviously did not mind) before we started the second quarter of the second semester.

The Second Quarter

Although all professors will tell you at the beginning of the semester that their subject is the most important one, in microeconomics I had the feeling that this time the prof was telling the truth (don’t get me wrong, I still love accounting). Here at KLU you will attend a microeconomics class that focuses on consumer behavior, understanding the market, market power, and game theory. The fun thing is that everything, absolutely everything can be expressed in curves.

You will also begin to attend an accredited language class at this point. Here at KLU, you can choose a language freely; you just have to find approximately five people with roughly the same level willing to study your language. The language class begins in the second and ends in the third semester. I love Italy and want to go there for my semester abroad, so I am now attending a language class with four other students and a tutor for around six hours a week. After one quarter of studying without any prior knowledge, I can already express myself using basic vocabulary.

There will also be a course called “Descriptive Statistics and Introduction to Inference Statistics.” I would consider it applied, since we will be working with real-world business problems and the lectures are supported by a series of exercises. The course is essential for the bachelor’s thesis.

The examination week with a total of three exams is rather exhausting, but don’t worry – the period for studying beforehand is long enough to prepare optimally. Our standard trackers are now awaiting the semester holidays while we intensive trackers will acquire practical experience during our three-month internships. I will cover them in one of my upcoming entries.

Bye for now,

Helen