Meet Our New Intern Whitney!

Hi Everyone! My name is Whitney Bryan and I am the spring intern for the Indiana State Personnel Department. I hope you will enjoy reading my blogs over the next several months. I am a senior at the Kelley School of Business in Indianapolis and I will be graduating this May (Yay!) with Bachelor’s Degrees in Human Resources, Management, and International Studies. I would love to work in HR and I have a strong interest in working for the state, so this internship is a great opportunity to explore what it would be like to work for the state. I was first exposed to the SPD when Heather Whitaker came to a business class of mine. I thought her job sounded really interesting and I was intrigued by the idea of having many HR departments working together to serve other entities to reach an overall goal. The state does just this; HR is working to deliver integrated services effectively to meet the goals of the state’s different agencies. I heard of this internship through one of my professors at school and through an informational interview I had with Heather. Heather and my professor both encouraged me to apply for this internship and told me that it would be a great experience. Heather told me an overview of the internship and I really liked the value this internship offers in giving their interns lots of experience with different agencies and the amount of “hands on” work. I am grateful for the opportunity of this internship because I know it is going to be so valuable.

Today is my second day here at the SPD and so far I have been very impressed with what this internship has to hold for me. I have a schedule for the course of this internship and it involves rotating into different divisions and some job shadowing opportunities. This internship is very exciting and fast moving which I like. I look forward to rotating with the different divisions and seeing many different perspectives of HR. Today I had a day full of meet and greets. I met several directors from different divisions and learned a little more about how the SPD works. One really interesting part of the state is the idea of centralized HR. All HR positions are controlled here and the different HR directors and generalists work for all the different agencies in the state. I think this is a really neat way to handle all of the agencies’ HR needs and I like the feeling of so many HR people working together to meet the needs of the state and agencies.

I am really looking forward to this internship. I know I am going to get a lot of exposure and will gain a lot of experience. I’m excited for the opportunity to work with so many different people and work with the many different divisions. I have high expectations for this internship and I know I will not be disappointed. So far, everything has been exciting and above my expectations. Stay tuned to read and follow my journey in this internship. I know I am going to learn a lot and I hope you can learn something too from my experience!