Stephen Conrad

I completed my internship at Barnes and Noble College Bookstore #240 under the supervision of store manager Andy Schaffer. The bookstore is located on the University of South Carolina campus in Columbia, SC. I felt fortunate to be able to complete my internship at this store for many reasons. One of the primary reasons was because I began working at this store two years earlier as a temporary employee. Over the course of the past two years I have moved from temporary employee to a bookseller position, a member of the manager training Bestsellers program, and then to supervisor of the textbook department. Because of my extensive experience in the store, I was able to bypass general orientations to the store and jump right in to my internship work. I was also fortunate to have a fellow employee working on an internship for the Technology Service and Training Management program.

We were able to work together on many of the projects, helping and learning from each other. I had done some work with the technological aspects of the bookstore in the past but I was looking forward to expanding my knowledge of what was available at the store while also enhancing store productivity by helping to integrate some new technology. While working on my internship I completed three major projects. The first was to set-up and maintain buyback terminals for the end of the school year. This is the system that the store uses during semester buyback periods. Setting up this system required that I arrange five AS/400 dumb terminals and two dot matrix printers in the buyback room. I had to daisy chain the terminals together with Cat 5 cabling and hook them to a central line. This line then ran back to the AS/400 server to provide connectivity. These terminals were used by cashiers when students returned their books at the end of the semester. The second project I worked on was an Access database for our freshman pre-pack program.

This project included designing, constructing and maintaining an Access database to my manager’s specifications. The database held information about each student’s order that will be accessed in the future so that employees will know which order goes to which student and how it is being paid for. The final project that I worked on was making visual basic programs to interface with the AS/400 system to automatically input ending enrollment figures from the university. This project helped me learn a great deal about visual basic programming and working with a foreign system to make the code work. In addition to this it provided the store with a program that helps get reports to upper management more quickly and efficiently than having multiple employees input the same data manually. This internship proved very useful for my career aspirations. Since completing my internship I have moved into the textbook manager position, a full time position in which I manage a staff of 15 to 60 people depending on the time of the year. This position also allows me ample opportunity to utilize the skills that I have acquired in the Technology Service and Training Management program. I plan to stay in this position for a number of years as it gives competitive pay, great benefits, and opportunities for advancement within the company.