Sarah Kissinger
BBA: Human Resources

Society Insurance is located in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. It is a regional niche player in insuring commercial-only small to mid-size businesses in Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, and Indiana. They specialize in insuring restaurants, grocery stores, taverns, cleaning services, and other niche markets like movie theatres and dining restaurants. If you take a walk in downtown Oshkosh, all those types of businesses are what Society insures.

I am currently the Human Resources Intern at Society Insurance. One of my responsibilities includes assisting in the recruitment process. This involves job posting, entering candidate information in the applicant tracking system, assisting with phone screens, setting up interviews, and administering testing. I also help with the on-boarding process when we hire a new employee. I prepare salary analyses for open positions by collecting data from various reports; I submit internal salary data to authorized data vendors, and track insurance institute training. I also work on different projects assigned and help with coordinating employee events.

Along with all my responsibilities, I am able to shadow my supervisor to experience everything that is done in the Human Resources Department. For example, I was able to sit in on a court hearing over the phone. This was a really neat experience for me to be able to see how the law fits in with Human Resources and apply the knowledge from my classes to the court case. My supervisor tries to include me in on as much as he can so I can grasp the full aspect of what it is like to work in the Human Resources department.

Society Insurance has an internship program that has taught me a lot about insurance. In this program, we attended presentations where we learned about each department and then went on various job shadows. This showed me how Society Insurance runs as a whole and not just in the Human Resources department.

I have learned a lot in the first few months of my internship. I have been able to apply what I have learned in the College of Business to real life experiences. This has given the opportunity to grow as professional and not just as a student.