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.