Summer internship at HP an 'amazing opportunity' for IST student

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Marilynn Zayan, a senior in Penn State's College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST), recently completed a summer internship at Hewlett-Packard Financial Services in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey. Zayan, who found out about the internship opportunity through IST’s spring career fair, chose HP because of its inclusive culture, intern responsibilities, and the convenience of its close proximity to her home in Connecticut.“HP has an amazing culture that is very flexible and encouraging,” said Zayan, of Monroe, Connecticut. “They promote reaching out to peers and they connect you with useful contacts. Managers also check in with their workers frequently to make sure things are running smoothly as well as ensuring the employee is happy with his or her position.”   According to Zayan, one of the best parts of completing an internship at HP was in realizing just how important the culture of her future employer would be.  “I learned the importance of fitting into the culture of the workplace and adaptation within a team atmosphere,” she said. “It’s important to be flexible when dealing with varying work ethics  and to maintain cooperation within the team to make sure that the job is completed to everyone’s best ability.”Zayan’s duties as an HP intern included creating a Web service that accessed the employee database and outputted search results, making information easily accessible. She said teamwork was paramount to the project and required research, trial and error, and enlisting the help of colleagues. Zayan and two additional interns created the entire Web application over the course of the summer, honing technical skills that Zayan said will help her in upcoming classes at IST and in her future career.  Aside from technical skills and the ability to work well within a team, Zayan said that she learned one valuable lesson during her summer internship that she will carry with her throughout her studies and into her future.“Always reach out to colleagues and higher-ups in order to get the necessary help you need,” she said. “I learned if you ask for help, when suitable, in order to complete a project in a timely manner, you may not get the answer you need, but they’ll at least get you started in the right direction.”And the right direction is exactly where Zayan is headed, after completing her summer internship that she called “an amazing opportunity.” She has now set her sights, after graduation, on working for a large company as a developer in a team-based atmosphere.