From bot-making to barley testing, Scoular internships are hands-on

This year’s Scoular Summer Internship Program recently concluded with 34 interns giving their final presentations at our Omaha headquarters. 

Students representing 16 colleges and universities worked across 17 Scoular offices and facilities during the 11-week summer program. The goal was to give them real-world experience, build their professional network and provide a perspective on working for Scoular. 

Interns attended virtual learning sessions with Scoular leaders, covering topics from professional development to company history, all while they worked on their projects and contributed to the success of their teams.

I spoke with four interns, who said they appreciated everyone treating them as part of the team.

Added Paige Maass, Scoular recruiter: “Our interns impact our business by bringing new, innovative ideas to the table, and Scoular is better able to pipeline in young talent.”

Here are some intern highlights from this summer:

Erin Pankoke, Northwest Missouri State University

Erin, a double major in finance and business management, interned at the Omaha office in accounting.

“My favorite part of my internship has been working with the corporate accounting team with the audit. It’s fun to see things on the year-end wrap-up,” Erin said. 

She said she gained hands-on skills with accounting and finance, such as finishing out year-end reports, maintaining requests from business partners, and assisting in pulling sample support for their third-party auditors. Erin said this internship has helped her become more confident in her skills and pushed her out of her comfort zone.

Olivia Kerrigan, South Dakota State University

An agriculture business major with minors in agri-marketing and Spanish, Olivia interned at our Twin Falls, Idaho, office in merchandising for the Feed and Food division.

Olivia said everyone made her feel welcome, and coworkers went out of their way to answer her questions. “This experience has given me a real insight into what my day-to-day will look like if I continue a merchandising career path. In my coursework, I learned the basics about futures and options, but Scoular has given me the opportunity to really dive in and learn a lot very quickly,” Olivia said.

She enjoyed visiting the nearby Scoular Emerge barley protein facility in Jerome, Idaho. Olivia helped at the facility by testing barley samples for weight and moisture. She said it helped her understand the logistics of commodity merchandising and see the process from when barley shows up on the truck to how it gets made into barley protein. 

Mason Armstrong, University of Arkansas

Mason said he started at Scoular with no agriculture background but learned a lot over the summer. He enjoyed meeting everyone, collaborating with his team, and learning what Scoular does. Mason completed two bots over the course of his internship. One is an automated process with spreadsheets to eliminate human errors. The second bot goes in nightly and deletes unnecessary backup files. 

Mason said it’s a great feeling to implement a project the company can use. “Everything I learned about developing software for real-life usage, working in a corporate environment, and the agriculture industry, are invaluable. Experience is the best teacher and being fortunate enough to gain this experience will help me immensely in my career,” he said. 

Jackson Pico, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

About the author

Fabiola Garcia-Ramos is a high school intern at Scoular’s Omaha office through the Intern Omaha Program. She is a senior at Millard North High School and during her time at Scoular is focusing on growing her knowledge about our business with the human resources team and with Scoular employees across the company.