Zoe Chetty
Topics of Interest: Internships, data analysis, MIS, strategic planning, insights, sales, marketing, Reynolds American
As our students work their way through various internships and career choices, several life lessons are learned in just a few weeks. Lessons like the power of networking and good work ethics are a few things you pick up along the way. Sometimes it’s simply applying what you learned in class on a major work project and realizing that you were wise to pay attention! But likely the most important thing students learn is that it’s totally okay to ask questions. In fact, asking questions is more than okay, it’s necessary! Whatever internship you work, just know that asking questions is always acceptable. After all, knowledge is power.
Take Canfield BHPer Zoe Chetty, for example. Zoe is a sophomore who previously attended a McCombs Career expo shortly before deciding to embark on a journey outside her comfort zone. There she found a great internship opportunity at Reynolds American as a Strategic Planning and Insights Intern – a position that emphasizes numerical and analytical skills, something Zoe was hesitant about. After experiencing first hand what working as an SP&I Intern entailed, she found that she actually liked working with numbers, setting her on a path toward her future career.
Zoe shares her experience both finding and working an internship and provides great insights about the process. Read more about Zoe and her time as an SP&I Intern at Reynolds American below!
Tell us about yourself.
My name is Zoe Chetty, I grew up in Frisco, Texas but I am originally from New Orleans. I’ve always been a super creative person who loves the outdoors and adventure, but being in the Canfield Business Honors Program has pushed me in a lot of different ways to experience the analytical sides of my personality and has taught me a lot in just the one year that I’ve been here. I always knew that I wanted to go to UT since I’m so close to my family and didn’t want to move more than four hours from home. Canfield BHP was something that I found out about, after discovering that business is what I wanted to pursue, through word of mouth from a few other people at my school who are also in Canfield BHP. Then I learned more about the small class sizes and the opportunities that Canfield BHP has and it seemed like an excellent opportunity to pursue.
What is Reynolds American? What is an SP&I Intern?
I met representatives from Reynolds American at the McCombs career fair last year. They are a tobacco wholesale distributor who sources and sells to different convenience stores across the United States. Recently, they were purchased by British American Tobacco, a global company, and have undergone many changes. This recent corporate restructuring was interesting to learn about throughout my internship. My specific internship position as an SP&I intern – that’s strategic planning and insights, is under the marketing department, but is more about data analytics, forecasting, and realizing trends. This is very pertinent to me, though I might not be interested in this industry later on in my career, there are many transferable skills within this role and it is very interesting to learn from. My everyday responsibilities included creating heat maps, dashboards, and different views of our trade data, whether that be picturing a specific sales region such as Texas or a nationwide brand. Then I would have to create a detailed description of which counties, brands, or products performed best and start predicting why. This work then tells the trade marketing team how to increase their promotions, how products should be changed and things like that. My reports essentially analyze how our sales have done in the past and what we can do better in the future.
What were some of your learning moments?
The only technical class that I had taken going into this internship was MIS, and the Excel skills I gained there were extremely useful. At the time, I struggled with the class and saw plenty of room for growth, however it was all worth it. Having knowledge of Excel formulas and how they work helped me quickly transition to real world applications. The first few weeks of my internship were spent piecing together the connection between this textbook and project learning into actually having to complete an important task for my supervisor. One of the biggest learning moments included seeing other employees complete similar tasks that I had learned in class and finally seeing the real world applications.
After being able to see the lessons that I learned in class put into the real world, I was able to replicate them and learn different technology platforms such as MicroStrategy, which is a SQL query platform we use to pull data reports and track our sales at Reynolds. I also learned how to create dashboards and more higher level visual representations of data. Those and more were cool learning techniques that I found outside of the classroom.
What career opportunities are you exploring that would utilize the skills you’ve learned so far?
The reason I picked this specific internship was that it was very outside my comfort zone. I didn’t think I enjoyed data analytics, numbers, or spreadsheets – nothing like that. I pushed myself to take this position and now I realized that maybe in the future, I would see myself in more of a data analytics role or something having to do with finance and doing quantitative analysis more often. Actually experiencing what jobs are like in these fields helped me a lot because I wouldn’t have tried something so numerical before this and I think it’s set me on the track for the future.
Now, because of this internship and speaking with colleagues at work, I’m thinking about pursuing the investment banking route, at least to start. Then following that path, joining a more corporate company in their finance department or transitioning back into a data analytics role. Taking those first steps and having multiple career jumps and opportunities is something that I would enjoy.
How can Canfield BHPers follow this path? Were there any hurdles for you?
No one in my family understands how the business world works. In fact, all of my family’s in medicine so I knew nothing about how internships or the interview process worked so I’d say that was one of the biggest hurdles in my internship experience as a whole. It was a lot of front end work for me to figure out who I needed to contact and how career expos worked. After attending McCombs career fairs and talking to people or reaching out on LinkedIn, I learned more and more about building a network, how to create a strong application and speak in a way that’s understandable to the professionals during interviews to show them that I have potential despite not having tons of knowledge right now.
I’d also like to note that being the only freshman intern was a little bit difficult and intimidating, especially at first because it felt as if a lot of people knew more than me or had been more experienced than me. That was something I had to overcome and figure out within the process. I learned never to be afraid of taking steps and opportunities. Whether you’re a freshman or a senior, always ask questions along the way because everyone’s always available to help you.