Intern Success Story: Laura Liu
By Nathaniel Kern, Human Resources Intern
July 24, 2019
The wild ride with The Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) began for Laura Liu, in August 2018. Her capstone project while attending the University of Denver’s Masters program for Business Information Analytics, was on predicting motor carrier crashes across the United States. This is what drew her to a CDOT internship with the Division of Accounting and Finance.
The Soft Skills Express
While working for CDOT, Laura was able to add soft-skills to her skillset that she had honed from her class work. Being able to multitask by breaking larger tasks down into small accomplishable portions, learning the ins and outs of annual budget reporting, developing the tech skills in google forms, sap, etc., and the awesome teamwork she experienced that helped move projects towards the best outcomes drove her professional development with the accounting department.
“Different people will have different ideas. Teamwork helps me to communicate with other teammates, share good ideas with the team, and learn from them.” – Laura Liu
Photo of Laura Liu
The Real Challenges
Laura dove in head first into the challenging budget work that helped shape her skills outside of her capstone project. Two of her assignments, one on finding and reporting decision items from divisions for the executive management team to review and approve and, the other, a project on the past-five-year software expenditure analysis for CDOT, helped define her experience at CDOT. These projects accomplished this goal by using the culmination of Laura’s budget and accounting skills, to develop a central budgeting system across different programs and different departments within CDOT.
For her project on the past-five-year software expenditure analysis for CDOT, Laura developed a report that saves time on monitoring budget requests from all divisions. As she describes it, “This report can be treated as the expenditure database for the divisions. They can not only review the whole CDOT’s expenditures’ trend but query the specific items’ historical expenditures from the expenditure database.”
The Future is Yours
Laura believes that learning new technologies and software is immensely important for developing into a superb future business professional. These skills have been extraordinarily important in her current career trajectory towards a budget analyst or data analyst position.
Next Generation Interns?
Laura suggests to future interns that being “detail-minded” when it comes to the work they receive at CDOT and “involved” in the team environment as soon as possible is critical to their success at CDOT. She also strongly believes that meeting other interns, and figuring out ways to network with those interns, will help them find success in their future endeavors.