Summer Internship: Amazon

Hi everyone, I'm Amarjoth Singh Walia, a second-year MBA student at Ohio State's Fisher College of Business. I recently completed my internship at Amazon as a Pathways Operations Intern at GEG1, Spokane, Washington. Fisher played a vital role in my application process for Amazon, providing me with the necessary tools, including interview preparation sessions, resume review & a vast network of alums who have joined the Pathways program. When I left India for my MBA, it was the company I dreamed of joining due to my passion for operations & supply chain management.

The Pathways program is considered a rigorous program with the company looking to hire the best operations managers in the market. I knew this internship would be challenging and push me to my limit. I was offered this opportunity during my first semester, and to best prepare myself for this challenge, I focused on relevant classes, including Data Tools, Operations Management, Supply Chain Management & Lean Enterprise Management.

The classes provided me with a strong base for the analytics involved in the internship, but my internship went beyond just analytics. I used these skills to identify the root cause of the problem I was brought in to rectify; This was the easy part of the internship. The real challenge was deploying my recommendations since it involved gaining buy-in from multiple stakeholders, training team members on changes, and actively seeking feedback on recommendations while incorporating the feedback to improve adoption and make the change easier to manage. This is where I believe key soft skill classes, including Negotiations, Organizational Behaviour & Leadership, equip me to make strategic decisions on how to manage the deployment of my changes.

My experience at Amazon taught me the value of soft skills and their importance, especially in an operations role, as it demands a lot of interaction with senior management and people reporting to you. My goal for the upcoming semester is to take on classes that further strengthen my soft skills.