Professional Services Intern Meeting

The Professional Services department coordinated a department-wide meeting with Professional Services management and all of us Professional Services interns. This meeting was based in a Redlands conference room, but I and other regional interns called in and participated in a webinar format.

At a high level, the goal of internships through Professional Services is to get interns working with GIS professionals to gain hands-on experience with real-world development. Additionally, the program hopes to give interns professional development and training opportunities, while allowing us to network and potentially find employment and career opportunities through Esri. This was really a reiteration of most of what Corianne and Leslie have shared with us at intern events, but was restated in this meeting.

Brian Cross went through an overview of the Professional Services department and Esri, generally, in a brief presentation. He elaborated on “The Science of Where,” and the current push to get GIS into new settings. He specifically mentioned the goal of getting businesses and universities more familiar with ArcGIS and Esri.

Professional Services is, in his own words, the “people part” of Esri. The Professional Services mission is to connect between Esri software and real world use cases and problems (which I love). I had been over a lot about this mission of PS with Josh and Ben, particularly, but this was a new presentation to discuss the goals of Esri PS to us as an intern cohort. Professional Services can be thought as creating “lighthouses” customer experiences that show them what ArcGIS and Esri software can do for them.

Brian mentioned that “location technology” and “location intelligence” can be lighter words to use when discussing GIS with less technical non-GIS professionals. PS blends the resources of the whole department to resource the right people to the right customer problems, and, doing so, keeps Esri customers happy and productive.

Brian re-emphasized Esri’s open-door policy, encouraging us to stop in and ask anyone about their areas of expertise. Of course, this is less relevant to me concerning Redlands offices, but he also encouraged anyone to reach out to employees in specific areas of their interest through Skype, Slack, or email. Brian also mentioned how elite Esri’s internship program is: out of over 9,000 applicants, only close to one hundred are chosen. I feel lucky to be part of this bunch!

Following Brian’s intro, he handed over the floor to a couple of former interns that now hold full-time positions with Esri, to share about their pasts and time with Esri.

Former Interns, Esri Employees

Jennifer Law was an Environmental Studies major in a California University, and she is now working for Esri Professional Services. Ariel Low shared a Story Map about her time with Esri before becoming a Technical Consultant. I’ve seen her come up on Slack multiple times, so it was good to put a face to her. She has a very interesting background working for EMS in her hometown, which informed her transition to working with the Public Safety and Health team. I love that this expertise transitioned into direct work with Esri in helping this industry area best use ArcGIS software. Ariel, with her field experience, was also sent to Houston with Esri to help with emergency software configuration during the recent hurricane. I love her on-the-ground work in this crucial area, and would love to work in an area similar to her, with a balance of industry expertise, emergency software configuration, and assistance to emergency medical services.

Intern Cohort!

Next we went around the room and all of the interns introduced themselves, their positions, and a little about themselves! I thought this was going to be a drag because of the webcam format, similar to the first intern full-cohort meeting, but this was actually very fun and beneficial! I could hear everything most interns introduced themselves with, and it was fun to hear about everyone’s backgrounds and projects — I have been wanting to learn what others are up to.

Most people were from California universities, which I guess is to be expected. One girl reminded me of myself as she described loving school, never wanting to graduate, and transitioning between biology, marketing, electrical engineering, and physics so far in her college time. She has also picked up woodworking!

David is the intern who had a picture with Jack from many years ago. He has been a GIS nerd for years, and I think he got a recent picture with Jack this summer to complement his young photo at the UC.

Rene, who is on Cody’s design team, is a German intern who would like to work for Esri Germany.

An intern named Lyn showed us a picture of their giant chinchilla, which was probably one of the cutest things I have ever seen.

There was one intern, Hector, from American Falls, Idaho! He was working with business administration and information systems and technology, and I would love to hear what it was like growing up in American Falls.

Kathy, an intern on the EEAP team, actually started a famous food popup in LA that sold rainbow bao at the night market! That was super fun, and I found an article with some images of all of the bao, so we could picture them, and shared it on the intern slack channel.

I didn’t get to hear much of the projects people are working on right now or during the summer up until this point, but people had plenty of fun facts to learn about the larger group I am in.

Story Map

Manager profiles and words of advice, as well as all of the intern profiles, were compiled and sent out afterward in a nice Story Map.