Ana Linares
Major(s): Canfield BHP, Finance, Minoring in Portuguese
Grad year: Spring 2022
Intern role/title: Finance and Business Operations Intern at Dell
A popular company with our students, Dell Technologies continues to attract top talent from across the state and abroad. As one of the best companies for students interested in the intersection of business and technology, Dell is also a great place to work. Take it from Canfield BHP senior, Ana Linares, who recently worked at Dell full time as a Finance and Business Operations Intern.
“My internship with Dell was pretty fun. It was my first time working in a full-time role as a Finance and Business Operations Intern, or CFO-intern as it’s normally called. I really enjoyed working with the people there.”
We caught up with Ana to talk about her time working at Dell. She shares what her experience was like and provides some great advice on choosing a workplace with a healthy work-life balance, an area where Dell has led the way. Read on for more!
Tell us about yourself.
My name is Ana Linares and I’m currently a senior from San Antonio, Texas. I’m a Canfield BHP class of 2022 student and in addition to business honors, I’m also studying finance and pursuing a minor in Portuguese.
Some of my past experiences here at UT have involved a lot of teaching roles. But one of my first experiences here was at a nonprofit student org called The Exponentialists, where I started as a content and marketing intern. I’ve also been a calculus tutor for the last two years. I love helping students because I was in their position not too long ago. I enjoy helping them understand the concepts so they’ll learn to like math a little bit more or hate it a little bit less. I’ve also volunteered with UTeach outreach by going to elementary schools to teach students lessons in STEM. Last semester, I also volunteered at a nonprofit called Project Brazil where I taught students Portuguese.
For me, there’s a lot of teaching going on in my life but I think one of my biggest interests would have to be language learning, I love it so much. In addition to Portuguese, I also speak English, Spanish, and I’m currently trying to learn German.
How did you discover the internship opportunity at Dell?
I learned about Dell during my freshman year. I remember there were so many business events on campus that year. It was a bit overwhelming at first, especially when you see all the different things you can do.
One of the first events I attended was called Day at Dell. I was actually able to visit their office in person and meet different people, see the office spaces, and learn about their financial development program, which I thought was very interesting. It’s a two-year program with four different rotations where you experience various roles within their finance department.
Then, during the fall of my junior year, I thought about some of the places I wanted to apply to. I remembered that first experience I had with Dell and how nice everybody was when I was there. I looked at listings through Recruit McCombs and found a specific internship that I wanted. As I was reading through the listing, I made the decision to apply and Dell later hired me.
How was your experience working at Dell?
My internship with Dell was pretty fun. It was my first time working in a full-time role as a Finance and Business Operations Intern, or CFO-intern as it’s normally called. I really enjoyed working with the people there.
Within Dell, there are several different groups and units. The group that I was placed in was called Investor Relations and they are a pretty unique group. They’re smaller than other groups at Dell and have to fully understand the whole business in order to inform different investors and shareholders on how things are going. Investor Relations is also in charge of developing the quarterly earnings reports, which for them, just happened earlier this month. That group is so well-rounded and always on top of everything. Their communication skills are great and I honestly believe they know everything there is to know about Dell. Because my group was smaller than the others, we were able to make change happen quickly and be more agile, which I thought was interesting.
At Dell, finance interns focus on a project they’ll later present towards the end of the internship. My project was on sovereign wealth funds which are funds owned by different states globally and I got to research more about them. Part of the Investor Relations team’s role is to target different investors that they potentially want for Dell. One group within that team is the Sovereign Wealth Fund. Since those types of funds don’t have a lot of public information available and are usually very secretive, I had to dig up any information that I could to learn more about them from different places. After I was done with my research, I had to recommend which ones I thought would be the best fit for Dell to target as investors in the future after their post-VMware spin-off.
Did you have to perform all or part of your Dell internship virtually? If so, what was it like for you?
Dell is doing everything virtually right now so all of my work was done remotely. It was quite different but because of school, I’ve gotten used to doing things virtually. It feels more different this year because you’re here for longer periods of time compared to classes where they’re not eight to five, but it was still a great experience.
Dell is a technology company and they’ve already been able to work remotely even before the pandemic started. They had a lot of useful tools. For example, they sent monitors to help us with our work, and I think they honestly ran things pretty smoothly. I found it hard to imagine how they work in person because they just ran things super well. I thought the remote meetings that I attended were pretty valuable. They’re not just meetings for meeting’s sake, they use their time efficiently.
Something great about Dell is their culture. There’s a great work-life balance and because of that remote aspect, you’re able to fully plan out your schedule how you want to and work different hours that you maybe couldn’t do in an in-person setting.
Was there a Canfield BHP class that you feel adequately prepared you for this internship? Are there any special skills needed to perform the job successfully?
I feel like all the Canfield BHP classes fully prepared me for these types of internships. I would say that a lot of the classes I took are great at preparing you. I remember my second semester at UT when we all took MIS301 and BA324. Those two classes combined are super useful. BA324 is all about communication skills, especially for business, as well as presenting, and I used a lot of those skills throughout the summer. Since my role involved a lot of writing, those skills came in handy.
I mentioned MIS301 specifically because the professor that I had didn’t just give you all the instructions for our Excel assignments directly. You had to practice using all your homework assignments and since the projects were a little bit more ambiguous, you had to come up with your own way to figure it out. In general, my project at Dell was quite ambiguous but since I was already used to doing those types of assignments in class, I was able to figure it out on my own.
What advice can you provide to students interested in working at Dell or similar internship opportunities?
When you apply for internships, you should make sure that you actually want to work with those companies. Don’t just apply to apply. I think it’s good when you go into an interview and you have an actual story describing why you want to be there. The interviewers will relate with you and see that. Also, try your best to connect with different people there because everybody has different experiences. Focus on ensuring that you can learn from those people throughout the internship.
In the future, I definitely want to work in a culture similar to Dells. It’s important to reflect on what kind of work culture you want because I really enjoyed this one. Everybody was super helpful and caring, and I felt like they trusted me the whole time. I never felt micromanaged but I had enough support. I also like knowing that Dell’s going to continue having flexible working arrangements in the future, like working remotely some of the time, for example. I think it’s important to consider the work factors that you want in your career and for me, Dell really aligned with a lot of those in general.