A Beneficial Summer

The greatest salespersons in any industry are usually individuals that possess dreamlike people skills.  They understand how to effectively communicate their information to the client.  They understand how to approach each customer with ideas that can help them be successful.  An effective salesperson cares about the relationships they create with clients.  One aspect of sales that is often over looked is that successful salespersons are always learning.

Insert my summer internship at Bayer CropScience.  Knowing my end goal after graduation is to work in the agricultural sales industry, I wanted to look for an internship that would benefit me down the road.  With my previous internship, I was able to see some of that sales side and learn from some fantastic professionals.  Which helped me realize that if I wanted to improve even more, I needed to understand the industry in a full spectrum.  My Bayer internship could not have offered a better experience for me.  As a Crop Protection intern, my duties included being the right hand man to one of their Senior Scientists.  My boss for the summer will always be someone that I will credit a lot of my knowledge in the field to.  As a veteran in the agricultural research world, his 35+ years of experience and dedication are incredible.  He and I began the summer planting numerous test plots and as intense as that process was, we began spraying.  I started a lot of my days by mixing different herbicides that we planned on spraying for that day.  Many of our herbicides that we were testing were pre-emergence, meaning that we had to apply them before the crop would emerge from the ground.  This made our time window to apply these herbicides very short.  Between the amount that we needed to do and the amount of rain we received early in the season, he and I were forced to work some long days.  My favorite part of the summer was looking at how all of the plots were affected by each individual herbicide with my boss.  He gave me great insight to the entire growing process from day one.  I can walk away from this summer saying that I learned from one of the best in research.  He challenged me to learn something new every day, and there were many days that I drove home from work thinking I could write a book on his knowledge that he had shared with me in that day alone. 

I wanted to learn more about the research side of the industry so in the future I would be much more capable of explaining how it works to customers.  After my summer of working at Bayer, I learned how much time and effort it takes on the research side to produce success.  More importantly, I gained experience and knowledge that will benefit me in the future.