Participants Comments | Internship Reports

Report on Internship and SOM courses. Summer 2000

Oleg Vostrikov

My first meeting with PIME-program occurred at March 1999 when Dr. Ted Williams (Dean of the School of Management at the University of Michigan-Flint) and Dr. Gregory Allar (Technical Director of PIME) came to the International Academy of Business and Banking, Togliatti and had a meeting with prospective PIME-attendees.
Then at October 1999 the first UM-Flint professor Dr. Mark J. Perry came to the IABB to teach "Business Economics". And during the year I had 6 UMF courses taught by 8

Professors:
Dr. Madhukar Angur - "Marketing Management",
Dr. Cathy Miller - "Accounting",
Dr. Betty Velthouse and Dr. Jack Smith - "Organizational Behavior & Human Resource Management",
Dr. Seyed Mehdian - "Financial Analysis",
Dr. Vahid Lotfi and Dr. Ted Williams - "Operations Management" (I took it by on-line via Internet)

I know that the content of the programs was carefully selected by Faculties of both Universities: 6 core business courses that were intended to place a basement for further business studying.

All in all, the PIME-Program was well planned and well executed.
I, as a member of SOM-IABB collaboration, could mention some possible improvements:
I base my suggestions on the conclusions I made analyzing my experience during the internship (Financial Department for the City of Flint):

1. Performance in Mondays in Wednesdays where we had 8 hours of Internship and 2.5 hours of the class shows that this kind of workload is tough but acceptable to the IABB students, which are used to hard work.

2. Tuesdays and Thursdays were not fully utilized, because we had only 2 classes those days totaling the efficient time to 5 hours per Tuesday or Thursday. So the significant resource is in utilizing those 2 days per week more fully.

3. The program of internship was very interesting. But as for me I think IABB students could do more valuable and important work for the organizations. According to the existing practice in the US, the internship takes 5 days per week for the period of 6 week to be functional (to allow students to perform real activities).

The proposals:

1. Make the 6 weeks 5-days per week internship.
This will allow students to make some particular job not just observe the organization.
2. Move the classes to the evening.
I proposed to increase the length and intensity of the internship that will make all daytime of the weekdays unavailable for studying. Thus the evening (at 7 PM) classes can be the solution. So we can see the following schedule (assuming passing 3 courses 2 classes of 2.5 hours per week for each course):

· Monday. 9:00 AM - 6:00 PM - Internship. 7:00 PM - 9:30 PM - 1st Class of the 1st course.
· Tuesday. 9:00 AM - 6:00 PM - Internship. 7:00 PM - 9:30 PM - 1st Class of the 2nd course.
· Wednesday. 9:00 AM - 6:00 PM - Internship. 7:00 PM - 9:30 PM - 1st Class of the 3rd course.
· Thursday. 9:00 AM - 6:00 PM - Internship. 7:00 PM - 9:30 PM - 2nd Class of the 1st course.
· Friday. 9:00 AM - 3:30 PM - Internship. 4:00 PM - 6:30 PM - 2nd Class of the 2nd course. 7:00 PM - 9:30 PM - 2nd Class of the 3rd course.

As you can see the proposed schedule decreases the total length of the Internship by only 3 hours per week (compared to the current schedule that decreased it by 16 hours).