Internship update

My summer internship with GE’s Renewable Energy Leadership Program is coming towards its end. I have about a week left and my final report-out is on Tuesday. The report-out is conveniently scheduled during “renewable energy week”, the week in which the leaders of GE’s renewables business fly to Schenectady from around the globe to do strategic planning and re-sync with one another. All six interns are going to present in an auditorium setting to about 80 people, including the VP of renewables. That scale of presentation will certainly be a first for me and is certainly a little intimidating, but it’ll certainly be a huge learning experience and a perfect opportunity to sell what we think is a really great idea to the key decision makers. My definition of success:the entire audience rises to their feet in applause and the VP handing us an oversized check to fund our project. I can hope, eh?

The overall experience has been amazing. I went through all of the phases that one goes through in a new professional experience—curiosity, overconfidence, frustration, and finally productivity. I’ve found everyone that I’ve worked with to be intelligent, thoughtful, driven, and very willing to help out whenever I had a question. I also got very lucky with my manager, who has given generously of his time and allowed Colin and I plenty of free reign to explore the problem witihout being led to any conclusions.

The work itself has been fascinating. We were thrown into a new product introduction (NPI) effort and have defined the solution, quantified the customer value, and figured out two potential business models that GE could use to capture a portion of that value. We talked to site technicians and executives, engineers and customer resolution managers, marketing and operations. We spent several weeks analyzing a dataset consisting of hundreds of thousands of turbine faults looking for patterns. We built consensus among key executives. We helped write product requirements document. And we built a straightforward set of financial projections based on reasonable assumptions combined with hard survey data that we collected.

And our project NPV is positive. How could I have asked for more?

Well, I suppose the one thing I would’ve liked is to get a better feel for how the industry operates at a more macro level. How saturated is the US grid? How does the grid regulate voltage and how does renewable energy penetration impact that? What are our competitors’ priorities? Where will wind be in five years (beyond a pure megawatt number)?

That said, 10 weeks is a very short amount of time, and the focus has definitely been on getting the interns to roll up their sleeves and get dirty. And I’ve really appreciated that. Over the past 10 weeks I have managed to develop the concepts behind what could be a pretty cool new product. If I read about it on greentechmedia in two years that’ll be pretty darn satisfying.

RELP Q&A

I got a couple general program inquiry from this post and wanted to relay the answer back so that others were aware of the answers. Full disclosure—I am a Renewable Energy Leadership Program (RELP) summer intern at GE and notpart of GE HR. This information is based on personal experiences during my application process.

How does RELP recruit for summer internship positions? Do they only take MBA candidates? Do they only take MBA candidates from certain schools?
You need to be finished your first year of an MBA program in order to be eligible.  RELP recruits summer interns from a small list of target schools. They come on campus to do recruiting at these schools. They also accept online applications, typically starting around January, from schools beyond the targets. Typically there are also a couple folks from the program that show up at the Net Impact conference with a recruiting booth set up.

What does a successful RELP internship resume look like?
Obviously you have to have the standard stuff. Good background, good education, etc. What will get you an interview is a demonstrated interest in renewable energy. The field is still small, so there isn’t an expectation that you’re an expert or that you’ve worked in the field for 5 years, but there is an expectation that you will have participated in activities, clubs, internships, or whatever else to explore your interest. Make this show through on your resume and in your cover letter.

How do I apply for the RELP summer internship?
The online application isn’t available until January every year and it can be a little tricky to find from the main GE Careers website. From what I hear the link tends to change from year to year, so if you can’t find it please contact me at the link above and I’ll find out what the current procedure is for getting to the application.

As always, if you have questions please contact me and I’ll answer them here.