Garrie Mushet

Name: Garrie Mushet
Club 21 Employer: IBM
Degree Subject: Aeronautical Engineering
Year of Graduation: 2012

Experience. Cash. Fun. These were the things I had in mind when I began searching for an internship and what follows is my story about how I managed to acquire all three with the help of Club 21, and the support of IBM.

The process began in March when an opportunity to work with IBM in their Greenock-based Technical Support Centre appeared on the Club 21 website. After going through the application process with Club 21 I was offered an interview, and subsequently I was offered the placement role.

Upon my arrival at IBM, I was introduced to the staff members and other interns with whom I would be working. I could not have hoped to find a better or more supportive team of people to work with anywhere! After settling into this new environment, my work began.

At IBM, the Technical Support Centre provides global support for a variety of technological devices and customers. On the call-centre floor, staff could be heard speaking Norwegian, Arabic, and a myriad of other languages, which I found extremely interesting (although I was not based in the call-centre for my placement). I was based in the floor below, where my role entailed analysing the performance data of the operations in the call-centre, and the business processes that preceded and followed them. From this data, my team and I developed ways to enhance IBM’s performance. Due to the diversity of IBM’s work, our task required a large range of skills and involved a variety of activities, from designing new software for the technical support staff, to building new business models and processes, and working effectively with the staff to communicate and implement them.

I feel that my experience in IBM was highly beneficial to me. Not only did I develop and hone skills I already possessed, but I developed new skills in a large host of areas, including public speaking (to deliver presentations), programming, business acumen, etc. However, I was also encouraged by the fact that I was made to feel that my role was beneficial to IBM. I was treated as a professional, as an established member of staff, and as such I felt that my role had significance and meaning to a company whose sheer size might have led me to conclude that my impact would be negligible. That is an encouraging feeling which I might not have experienced had I taken an alternative employment route for summer.

The support from Club 21 was also superb, providing an indifferent third party to rely on, rather than finding myself alone in the middle of my placement in Greenock with no familiar faces and lots of expectations on my shoulders. They made the experience very pleasant indeed.
So if you too want to make money, have fun, get work experience, make friends, gain new skills, develop old skills, and get a taste of the professional world, I would thoroughly recommend a placement with IBM, and, more generally, with Club 21.