Today marks week 4 of my internship. I’m already over half way done and I can confidently say that I’ve learned so much about GEICO and all the opportunities and benefits it brings to its employees and the community. As a GEICO intern I’ve been able to meet almost all of the Region 7 managers and VPs. A few times a week we’ll have a manager or supervisor from a department come in and talk to us about that department and their GEICO experience. These sessions have been impactful because we get to see how GEICO truly cares about their employees and promoting from within.

Along with meeting with managers, we are also meeting with our assigned mentors weekly. My mentor is the director of HR and I couldn’t have been more thankful for such a strong minded, ambitious, and fun mentor to look up to. She has given me such great advice over the past few weeks and has given me the confidence in knowing I’ll make a great leader someday. Between meetings with managers and mentors, we are working on weekly projects with our groups. These projects are real-time business problems that GEICO is facing. They give these tasks to us interns because they are looking for a new perspective on problems they are hoping to overcome. A lot of what I’ve learned in classes in the Luter School have helped me when working on these projects. When looking at data I have to use specific formulas I learned in Data Analytics and Management Science to help analyze the data given to me. After doing research and analysis we present these projects to all the managers, directors, AVPs, and the Regional VP. When presenting these projects it can be a bit nerve wracking with such an important audience, but I couldn’t be more thankful for taking Dr. McMahon’s Business Leadership class which taught me how to create an appealing presentation and how to properly present that presentation. Without that class I wouldn’t have gone into that first presentation as confident as I was and I wouldn’t have received that excellent feedback that I did. It is an awesome and fulfilling experience knowing they trust us with this responsibility and they hope to put our solutions into their business plans.

Lastly, when we’re not working in the office we are going on fun field trips! Last week we got to go down to Norfolk to one of the body shops that we partner with to see how our adjusters assess damaged cars to give the most accurate estimates for our policyholder’s claims. It was a cool experience to see everyone in action! We also had the opportunity to see GEICO’s new business solution “ARX 2.0”. This solution is to hopefully speed up the estimation process and cut costs. This week we get to go to a crash test site to see the test runs in action!

Overall, GEICO’s environment and culture have been nothing but uplifting, fast-paced, supportive, feedback heavy, and challenging. GEICO cares so much about its clients, employees, and the surrounding local community. This is something that you see up in the corporate office all the way down to the call center agents. It has been an awesome experience interning for such a great company.