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OCTOBER 2002 MBA JOURNAL: SUMMER INTERNSHIP Sucharita Mulpuru: Learning in the Real World Classroom "I was lucky to have clear deliverables, regular reviews, support throughout the company, and above all, plenty of autonomy. One of the best features of Intuit is its friendly culture of sharing." I was fortunate enough to be able to decide on a summer internship that not only required no relocation, but also happened to be in the Palo Alto area -- in my case, it was a company a mere five minutes from my school-year apartment. Intuit, the billion-dollar maker of personal finance software (Quicken, QuickBooks, TurboTax), is located on its own campus of about nine buildings with lush trees and fountain-filled landscaping in Mountain View, California. Other offices are in Southern California, Arizona, Virginia, and other states, but the large majority of the company's employees work in Silicon Valley. I decided on the company after a series of interviews on both Stanford's and Intuit's campuses. I was very impressed during my initial screening talk in our Career Management Center's offices with my interviewer, a current product manager and recent MBA graduate himself. I left the talk with high hopes. My next round happened in an Intuit conference room with two more very smart and interesting marketing executives. The final round was a 'fit' round, in which several managers looking for interns interviewed several students. Both the interviewees and the interviewers then rank-ordered their preferences for placement. I ended up selecting one of my second-round interviewers who, lucky for me, picked me as well. The entire hiring process ended up being a fairly extensive one as Intuit ultimately took nearly two dozen MBA interns for this summer (one of Intuit's largest crops of interns ever). They came mostly from Stanford (about a third of the total), Harvard, Kellogg, and other top programs. Intuit turned out to be an indisputably wonderful employer. Not only is it the market leader in the personal finance software space, with a strong stock price and a very promising future, but the company also tops many 100 Best Places to Work lists. The examples of why the accolades are well-deserved were countless -- weekly yoga classes, a free gym on campus, Friday happy hours. And that's not to mention other professional perks reinforcing the company's respect for life outside of work, including adoption assistance, paternity leave, and telecommuting opportunities. (Many city dwellers at both junior and senior levels work at home during the week to avoid the brutal commute down to Silicon Valley -- one executive was even rumored to live in Hawaii!) In fact, several of my colleagues during the summer were new moms or moms-to-be who had several months off and part-time schedules to accommodate their new lives. Even Steve Bennett, the CEO, proudly boasted to the interns that he played over 100 rounds of golf last year. I had rarely seen a company as generous or respectful of the personal lives of employees. For the summer, Intuit had a smattering of MBA internships in finance, business development, operations and engineering, but the majority of them were marketing positions in one of the three business lines (Quicken, QuickBooks, TurboTax). The key reason for this is that marketing, more than at most high-tech companies, is an extremely important function at Intuit, given the company's substantial direct-to-consumer component. While many technology companies like Siebel or Cisco sell their products to large corporations, or through a professional sales force, Intuit sells its products to customers through stores and the Intuit Web site. Not only are there several hundred marketers throughout the company, many in senior positions, but they hail from blue-chip marketing backgrounds. This is unusual in hi-tech as most Silicon Valley companies make marketers out of engineers. In my group alone, my colleagues were former employees of General Mills, Procter & Gamble, Levi's, and American Express -- an indication of the importance Intuit places on research-based, consumer-focused business decisions. No doubt, much of this emphasis on classical marketing experiences emanates from the founder Scott Cook, who himself cut his teeth years ago at P&G. For each product there are two marketing capacities. The first is product management, which, through consumer interviews and market research, creates the blueprint for what the product will look like and works with engineers to execute it. The second is brand management, which manages the marketing budget and revenues (and profits) that the product ultimately delivers. I worked with a growing team called the Vertical Solutions group which launched extensions of the QuickBooks brand. As background, QuickBooks is an accounting software package for small businesses. My group worked on creating and executing marketing plans for new versions of QuickBooks that provided customized software for specific industries (accounting, contractors, non-profits, etc.). During the summer, I had several projects -- some strategic, others tactical -- dealing with the new Accountant Edition version of QuickBooks. Fortunately for me, the projects were made as painless as possible by my managers. I was lucky to have clear deliverables, regular reviews, support throughout the company, and above all, plenty of autonomy. One of the best features of Intuit is its friendly culture of sharing. In the QuickBooks group for instance, there was a central repository for every document, memo, presentation, and piece of research that had been done in the last several years, all available to any employee through the company's Intranet. Of all the companies I'd worked with before, I'd never had such easy access to internal data. Elsewhere, either the information was disorganized -- or, worse, employees were reluctant to share it. Another pleasant surprise was that Intuit was a very MBA-friendly culture. Many current employees (and founder Cook) in fact hold MBAs from the country's top programs, and several of the company's rising stars started their careers at the company through the internship program, which is largely viewed as a pool for cultivating talent. The respect for the program was evidenced by the positive experiences the company tried to ensure all interns-'meaty' projects, regular feedback, a 'buddy' system, private meetings with all of the companies top executives, including the CEO and CFO, and a slew of social events like cocktail receptions and a Giants game. Because of the frequent outings, and our large Stanford cadre, the Intuit interns came to be quite chummy, regularly gathering to lunch at the nearby In-n-Out Burger on Fridays, and to go to social outings such as karaoke, golf, or bowling. By late August, my ten weeks at the company were over. For now, I have an option to return to the company after graduation but in the interim, I have a few key concerns to sort out. Is a software company for me? Is the Bay Area for me? But at the moment, readjusting to my final year of school is the near-term challenge. At the end of my first year of business school, I was more certain than ever that I really wanted to pursue a career in marketing. To that end, I am now interested in tailoring my second-year experience to help me be a stronger manager in a marketing organization. Many of my classmates have been eager for a final dose of Corporate Finance (self-flagellation as far as I'm concerned!), but I'm keen on taking some of the psychological theory-based GSB classes, particularly in the Human Resources and Organizational Behavior departments. These, after all, are courses known for preparing students for the politics and complexities of working within organizations. Already, I have finished an intense two-week, pre-term version of the GSB cult class Interpersonal Dynamics (popularly referred to as Touchy Feely). It's largely a class in emotional intelligence, if there can be such a thing, and it has been one of the highlights of my B-school experience. With the help of a small group of classmates and professional facilitators (officially called a "T group"), we were taught to understand the emotional impact of our behavior on others and to develop far deeper insight into motivating and leading others. From an extracurricular standpoint, I'm continuing my involvement in various clubs, planning a study trip to Cuba for the end of the year, tutoring a first year in statistics, playing some golf on the Stanford course, and having more of those dinner parties I promised myself last year I would have. So far, the tally is this -- I've got a roster of super classes, the possibility of a great job next year, and an impending school trip to the Caribbean in December. While first year was a blast, they say second year is even better. So far, I can definitely second that! To contact Sucharita, write her at smbweek@yahoo.com.  Get BusinessWeek directly on your desktop with our RSS feeds.  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