MBA Intern Series: From Internship to Dream Job

By Diane Wauters  /  October 5, 2016

In the last of this series, we come full circle to an intern who accepted a full-time position. Diane Wauters is our newest hire to the Agricultural Development team. During her summer at Columbia Business School, she was a MBA intern with the Global Procurement team in Leuven and worked on a variety of projects from packaging innovation to SmartBarley in China.

 

At the end of my summer internship last year, I was very excited to receive a full-time offer to work in Agricultural Development, focusing on our APAC barley programs. After only a few months, I know that coming back full-time was without a doubt the right decision, and I start each day excited by the challenges that await me. Below are a few of my thoughts on why I chose AB InBev.

Dream - as a MBA student my dream was to find an internship where I could leverage my experience in China and my interest in water and  still challenge myself every day. Beyond my expectations, during my summer, I was exposed to various functions in procurement and was able to cultivate new areas of interests, such as crop management (which would explain how I ended up in agricultural development!).  

People - being surrounded every day by high-energy people who focus on delivering results is contagious and I loved it. I had the opportunity to work with very diverse people from our Environmental Technical Advisory Committee (an external panel of experts on watersheds, water systems and sustainable agriculture) to barley growers in Inner Mongolia.

Culture - I had the chance during my internship to absorb our unique company culture -  growing fast, achieving targets and being rewarded for my work with more opportunities.  I value a company where I can be proactive and run with new ideas. From the start, I was given ownership of real projects, not busy work. During my internship, I developed a soil nutrient management project to be implemented in China. After I left, the team continued with the work and now that I’ve returned, I am executing the project with our local agronomist team.

My advice to anyone considering a career at AB InBev - work hard, be curious, don’t expect too much hand-holding, adapt the right attitude to learn and the opportunity is yours. Grasp it!

 

Diane working with the China agronomist team on SmartBarley reviews