United Parcel Service - Airlines

The following is Jeffrey Merritt's (CS) report about his first co-op tour at UPS Airlines:

My company, United Parcel Service, is at the forefront of the package delivery industry as it is the world's largest such company. However, they are not limited to delivering just little brown boxes. United Parcel Service also does freight and supply chain solutions. The United Parcel Service also maintains the world's ninth largest airline while being in over 200 countries.

In this first semester at United Parcel Service, I have been introduced into many different aspects of the business. As I work for the airline division, UPS Airlines, most of my dealings have involved the airline. In the first several weeks, I was exposed to and learned about many of the different systems that are maintained and supported by the team to which I was assigned. Several of the assignments that I was given were to test the programs in development for bugs and provide feedback. I also did some updating of the documentation on the systems and programs. I have also been involved with several website development projects. I overhauled the ColdFusion ACMX team website as one of my first assignments. Since then, I have helped in the web transition of several teams over to SharePoint sites from their original ASP or ColdFusion sites. I currently maintain 6 different SharePoint sites. Towards the end of this tour and moving on into my next 2 tours, I will be involved heavily in the fleet acquisition team. Since I am doing 3 consecutive tours, I will get to be a part of this great undertaking by my company.

  Over this semester I have learned many different things including several new languages. For example, I have worked in ASP, ColdFusion and Visual Basic 6. I may have the opportunity to work with C# and VB dot net in the future. I have also been working with Microsoft SharePoint services and learning all about its usefulness and capabilities. This is all on top of learning about the company and the operation of the team I am a part of.

I was able to benefit from the web design and programming that I did at my previous job. While I did not do extensive work in this area previously, I had some experience to build off of once I got to United Parcel Service. I do think that I a little more technical knowledge on programming will come in useful in the future. But the work experience and time that I am currently putting in on the job here will be immensely more useful in the long run. From my experience, school can teach general knowledge, theory and thought, work teaches specific processes and procedures, as well as giving experience in languages and projects. It also teaches interpersonal skills, learning to work with co-workers and customers.

  My co-workers treat me as a regular employee. They expect for me to maintain a high level of professionalism and to behave as any other employee would. As I am apart of a team, I am treated like a regular team member. When I need assistance or clarification with an issue, I can ask the programmer or analyst that I am working with and get the guidance that I need in order to complete my task or to help them complete theirs. This job has taught me a lot on the operation within Corporate America and how it works. I have learned what it takes for a company of this magnitude to operate successfully and the number of resources that it draws on in order to succeed.