Matt's Summer Internship in Houston

Second year I/O student Matt York posing with his fancy office sign at Occidental Petroleum in Houston. 

How does a summer full of great food, great fun, and warm weather – all just forty minutes away from the beach – sound to you?!  That describes my most recent summer in Houston.  I had the privilege this summer to intern at Occidental Petroleum Corporation, or Oxy, in Houston, and it was the greatest professional experience of my life!  For those not familiar with Oxy, they are the fourth largest oil producer in the United States, # 1 in Texas.  Oxy also has a chemical division in which they are the nation’s number 1 or 2 producer of every product they make.  But what I think makes Oxy so successful is the way they treat their employees.  Every employee at Oxy is valued, and their pay, benefits, and autonomous work schedule reflects that.  Not to mention, Oxy offers the 9/80 work schedule in which you get every other Friday off!

         

   More importantly, though, Oxy provided me with an amazing learning experience that I will take with me throughout my career.  In my nearly three months in Houston, I worked on three very fun and challenging projects for the West Texas HR team.  I assisted a colleague with a job analysis, I worked with four other HR interns to develop an online onboarding toolkit for new HR employees, and I performed extensive analyses on the performance data of a select group of Oxy employees.  While all three projects taught me very different sets of skills, my entire experience taught me three important lessons:  (1) teamwork is vital no matter what your work is, (2) a key driver of success on a project is getting buy-in from the project’s stakeholders, and (3) I am capable of much more than I initially believed. 

         

   All of those skills and lessons I learned this summer I am now able to utilize in my current internship at Leadership Worth Following (LWF)!  In this internship, I have really applied everything I’ve learned in the last year and a half at UT-Arlington and the lessons I’ve brought with me from Oxy to be successful and further understand the depth and application of Industrial-Organizational Psychology… this time from the external consultants’ perspective.

Check out the new logo for "The Center!"

UTA I/O Students to Apply for Harvard Institute of Coaching Funding

MONEY! (Queue the Pink Floyd song). Who has it and where can I get some? If I had a dollar for every time I asked that question....

Fortunately, there are a multitude of organizations out there that are just itching to give their money away...and all we have to do is ask! So, what's the catch? Unfortunately, as you might imagine, there is bit more to successfully acquiring funding than simply asking for it (though that would be nice). As such, teaching and coaching students on successfully applying for research grants is one of the critical research (and practitioner)-based competencies ingrained in the curriculum of the I/O Program at UTA.

As part of the Applied Research Design course, a group of I/O and Experimental Psychology students are currently preparing applications for grant funding, both as an exercise in familiarization with the grant application processes, as well as to get the ball rolling on...well, applying (and hopefully receiving!) funding. Here is the story behind just one of the many grants that we hope to see come to fruition in the near future:

This past summer, I/O Master's student Aaron Friedman had the opportunity to spend the day with Carol Kauffman, the Director of the Institute of Coaching (IOC), an affiliate of Harvard's medical school, as part of his internship at the local consulting firm Leadership Worth Following. The IOC's mission is to to build the scientific foundation and best practices of leadership, wellness and personal coaching, a mission they carry out by bridging the gap between science and practice - similar to the vision of the Industrial and Organizational Psychology Center at UTA. 

Together with fellow M.S. student Katy Ramsey (who not only completed a successful summer internship in the H.R. department at Oxy Chemical, but was also offered a full-time position following graduation this coming May), these students have been in touch with senior advisers to the IOC, who are interested in funding empirical research on coaching outcomes at the organizational level. We are looking forward to continuing to develop our relationship with the IOC, and work together to bridge the gap between science and practice. Stay tuned as we keep you updated on all our students' grant proposals, research initiatives, internships, and more!

For more information: 

Institute of Coaching

Industrial and Organizational Psychology Center on Facebook

Leadership Worth Following

Oxy Chemical 

Dr. Carol Kauffman, Director of the Institute of Coaching, with I/O Master's student and Leadership Worth Following Intern and Associate Consultant, Aaron Friedman. 

Introducing our new blog!

The students and faculty in the Industrial and Organizational Psychology Master's Program are proud to  introduce our brand new blog to keep you updated on the latest news, events, and opportunities in the I/O program here at UTA. Stay tuned for updates on internships, jobs, speakers, seminars, and more!