Intern Update: Andres Garcia

Andres Garcia

Analytics & Technology, College of Business, Influence, and Information Analysis

Blue Cross Blue Shield Kansas City - Sourcing Analyst Intern

During my internship I realized that there is a lot of different career opportunities in this industry. This is also because business analysts are in high demand right now and that’s not just in the health insurance industry, but in general. There is also a lot of potential to move around in BlueKC and experience more than just one department. Based on my experience, I would say that I definitely found the health insurance industry to be interesting. Yet, I do not know if it is my ideal industry to start a career in. I would definitely like to explore other types of industries and also other types of departments, such as working in an IT department, or cyber security. I think that it is important to explore other options and to become a jack of all trades in the initial stages of my career and then later on specialize in one specific trade.

There were some challenges but there were also some successes. For example, being able to create my first visualization in Power BI. I had previous exposure to visualization tools, but I had never worked in depth with them, therefore when I accomplished my first couple visualizations it was a proud moment. Another success was being able to give a presentation over the “Spend Cube” project. This was very exciting and rewarding to me because there were upper level management that attended my presentation and they all gave me good feedback.

This leads to some valuable experiences that I had during my internship. I think the main experience that I gained from my internship was the real-world exposer to an analyst career. This comes with certain surprising challenges, such as data quality. In school all the data we worked with was fairly clean and required little to no medication, yet, the data that I worked with was inconsistent, and required a lot of hard work in order to get it to an acceptable condition. Another valuable experience is learning about different work cultures and how they can vary from department to department.