The Riata Entrepreneurial Internship Program

Overview

Intern Brandon Wise, MBA ‘11 with Les Hutchens, CEO of Reproductive Enterprises, Inc.

The Riata Entrepreneurial Internship Program provides unique entrepreneurial opportunities for highly qualified undergraduate and graduate students at Oklahoma State University. The program will offer up to 20 student internship appointments annually. These appointments require student interns to work directly with an entrepreneur, president, or senior executive in a high-growth, innovative company located in the Stillwater, Tulsa or Oklahoma City metropolitan areas. Interns are expected to add meaningful value to the work environment and to produce a number of useful deliverables to company management. Interns also take independent study credits in order to meet certain curriculum requirements.

Being selected as a Riata intern is both an honor and a challenge. Interns will be able to participate in exciting, hands-on, experience-based learning opportunities in entrepreneurial work environments.

Overall this internship was a great experience for me. Over the course of the semester I was able to learn many interesting things and gain some valuable experience that has already helped me with my career. When I interviewed with Noble, this internship became one of the key topics in my interviews. They were impressed that I took the initiative to go in and find the problems myself then they were even more impressed with some of the solutions that I had come up with. Halfway through my interview with the head of the IT department he called in the heads of the business services and international departments to listen about what I had done in this internship. They eventually decided to hire me as an international business analyst, a position that they had never hired anyone with less than 6 years of experience for.

Working with REI was a great experience. I am very happy that I worked for REI because I not only experienced some things that I will be able to tell stories about for the rest of my life, but I was able to learn a lot about working with different types of people and most importantly I feel that I was able to provide them substantive value through my knowledge of business and management information systems.

-Brandon Wise, MBA ’11

“I am happy to tell you that I have accepted a position as a SharePoint Consultant at PointBridge Solutions in Chicago. The technical and entrepreneurial experience I gained during the internship helped me a lot. Thanks again for the opportunity to be part of the Riata Entrepreneurial Internship Program.”

Ajay Ram, MS in MIS ’10