“For the first time, we hired an equal mix of interns from Cornell and from other institutions,” said Tammy Dibble, Director of Human Resources in Cornell's Office of the Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. She’s talking about the annual Alliance for Diversity and Inclusion (ADI) summer internship program that matches student applicants with supervisors and teams across Cornell and the importance of drawing participants from a wide range of institutions.

Dibble said, “Although we received over 200 applications and filled more than 30 internships, it wasn’t until we listened to the interns’ introductions during orientation that we recognized how well our 2024 cohort had achieved our goal of diversity and inclusion. They arrived in-person or virtually from large and small institutions, private and public, cities and rural settings."

The full 2024 cohort spanned universities and colleges in locations from Georgia to California, but two-thirds of the interns represented New York institutions. Four of the New York interns headed to teams in Cornell Information Technology (CIT), Cornell Retail Services and the Division of Financial Services. Read more about their experiences:

• An Information Systems and Business Analytics major at the University of New Hampshire, CIT intern Alexander Christen joined the Analytics and Reporting team to work on developing a Tableau dashboard to display the usage statistics of various workbooks created by his colleagues.
• Cornell Computer Science major Max Wang focused on a software challenge in Cornell Retail Services’ enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. He said, “My job was to develop a secure and sustainable data feed from our web-to-print service for our ERP, to automate logging, billing and fulfillment services –an integration that could significantly streamline operations.”
• University at Buffalo Business Administration and Management major Dara Ben-David’s updated 2024 process map reflects how contracts move through the university’s Kuali Financial System (KFS) to the JAGGAER software platform and back and provides tracking for the contract at each stage of its lifecycle for colleagues in the Division of Financial Services.
• SUNY Geneseo Finance and Mathematics major Robert Hager also focused on processes in the Division of Financial Services. He said, “A lot of my projects focused on how a central function can create better internal controls across units. Each unit is required to conduct a detailed risk assessment, outlining potential risks, rating their severity, and proposing controls to mitigate them. My task was to analyze these assessments, highlight the most significant areas of concern, and aggregate the data into a comprehensive report.”

Around Cornell, potential employers interested in hiring students through the next ADI internship program may contact Dibble for details. Students can join a mailing list for new job announcements by emailing adi-intern@cornell.edu.