In just a couple of months, Shreya Mittal will receive her Master of Business Administration degree from the Weatherhead School of Management.
Between her course work, serving as president of the Weatherhead Women in Business student organization and director of professional development for the Graduate Student Council, she has also been gaining hands-on experience through a fellowship program with the Great Lakes Cheese Company––which supplies 25% of all the packaged cheese consumed in America.
“The experience has been exceptional,” Mittal (pictured above) says. “This is exactly the type of fellowship you want to do when you're on the verge of graduating.”
Mittal started the fellowship last semester as the assets scheduling and optimization intern, where she’s been aiding the operations team and reporting to the vice president of operations.
On a day-to-day basis the operators who work on the packaging machines need to know exactly how to schedule the types of cheeses that are getting processed and when––to avoid contamination. Mittal is exploring the use of a sequencing tool to help optimize the process, which is currently done manually.
“This is the place I can implement the knowledge I'm learning from my classes,” Mittal says. “What I learned today in class, I can apply tomorrow at work.”
Mittal learned about the fellowship program through a workshop hosted by Weatherhead’s Office of Career Management.
“The Career Management Office is one of the best assets that we have,” she says. “The entire team is so prompt with helping out students and supporting them.”
Mittal is one of three Weatherhead students participating in the fellowship on site at the Great Lakes Cheese headquarters in Hiram, Ohio.
The company is in a growth period, which is what prompted the fellowship program, says Nicole Crews, senior manager of organization and talent development at Great Lakes Cheese.
“It required us to look at talent in a very different way, which is not just to go and recruit for talent, but to think about how we can develop talent through an experience with a really good university,” Crews says. “We already had a relationship with Case Western Reserve [University] and to grow that partnership we decided to look at how we can bring in talent from the university to solve problems and drive solutions, with an idea that the talent can grow in a fellowship that we can potentially hire in a full-time position.”
Paridhi Maheshwari (pictured left), a second-year, master of supply chain management student, has been a demand planning analyst intern at Great Lakes Cheese since last semester. She follows the seasonal demand and trends for the products, and predicts how the items are going to run.
“I’ve worked in demand forecasting before, but not on such a large scale where you are actually taking care of more than 5,000 SKUs at a single point,” she says. “Seasonality can happen, demand can change, there are a lot of different constraints that actually come together. It’s amazing to see how you handle that process and make sure all the individual, small components are working in tandem.”
Outside of Maheshwari’s work, she says the atmosphere at Great Lakes Cheese is one she’s greatly enjoyed.
“It is very employee centric,” she says. “They make you feel like a very valued member, and they take the time and energy to invest in you and help you learn about the business.”
Nishitha Laveti (pictured below), a second-year, STEM MBA student, shares similar sentiments.
“Great Lakes Cheese has an amazing work culture where people are so supportive and helpful,” she says. “I have never come across a company where they follow their work culture so diligently.”
Laveti started her fellowship in January as a supply chain planning intern with a focus on the transportation department.
“It’s a great opportunity for me as a student to explore areas where I could be guided by the best expertises in the field,” she says. “This opportunity is helping me to get a complete exposure on a logistics and supply chain department.”