When fourth-year global supply chain management student Taverious Davis recently updated his LinkedIn profile, he received four messages regarding a job almost immediately.
It was all for one simple reason: his summer internship with Coca-Cola.
“When they see you have a position with such a popular company, everyone is interested in you and wants you to work for them,” Davis said. “They know how hard it is to get an internship at Coca-Cola.”
After a phone interview and two in-person interviews, Davis earned one of the six offered internships with the Fortune 500 company, but he sees this experience as more than just a bullet point on his resume.
He is working in the area of operational excellence, meaning his focus is on improving processes of the company and saving money for Coca-Cola.
He primarily works on two projects, a raw materials project and a 5s audit. A 5s audit has five different phases: sorting, straighten, shine, standardize and sustain. A lot of Davis’ work on this project involved going to a specific area and making sure that it followed the five phases.
Even with only a 12-week internship, Davis hoped to make a real change inside of the company.
“My favorite part is being able to work on real projects and being able to work with real work managements and senior level executives on the progress of my projects,” Davis said.
From having the experience with Coca-Cola, Davis was able to learn a lot about how an actual company operates and have the opportunity to work inside of a real business.
“Knowledge in sales is one of the biggest tools you use in a company. To be very successful, you have to know sales to the T,” Davis said. “There’s so much that goes into a company, and trying to learn all of that in 12 weeks was the hardest part for me.”
Davis believes that the Darla Moore School of Business played a significant role in preparing him for the internship. He believes the school prepared him through resume help, opportunities to serve in leadership positions and the overall experience.
He even found out about the opportunity for the position in the business school building, where he saw a table set up for Coca-Cola. He gave a representative of the company his resume, and he followed her advice to apply on the Career Center’s internship database, JobMate.
“In the process of applying [for internships], definitely go for it full force because the internships and positions are out there, you just have to be the one to go for them and find them,” Davis said.
Davis intends to return the favor by applying his new skills when he returns to the university. He learned a lot about being able to interpret and analyze data, as a large part of his job and projects was to decide the best principles for the company to instigate, and he plans to use this new knowledge in his schoolwork come August.
When he graduates in December, he hopes to spend two more years rotating through different jobs in the business world in order to get more experience before receiving a Masters in Business Administration and finding a full-time job.