Summer internship provides experience creating virtual courses for Boeing’s global workforce

Rachel Mastro’s summer internship has taken her more than 3,000 miles from NC State University’s Poole College of Management in Raleigh, to Boeing’s headquarters in Seattle, Wash.

“It’s neat to see another part of the country,” she said, noting that driving to Seattle took her 12 days through the Midwest, with stops in Nashville, St. Louis, Kansas City, Denver, Salt Lake City, Lakeview, and Portland.

At Boeing, she is one of about 1,000 interns that the company has brought in for the summer from schools like Cornell and Carnegie Mellon, as well as NC State’s College of Engineering. Over 165 candidates applied for her internship.  

Mastro is in double major in psychology and business administration, with a concentration in human resources at NC State’s Poole College of Management. Previously, she completed an eight-month with BMW, working in the areas of leadership and professional development. She also has completed an internship at NC State’s human resources department and with Elster Solutions.

Learning by doing: training and development 

This summer, she is working in the training and development department in Boeing’s Office of Internal Governance, helping to develop courses that cover compliance policies in the areas of audit, ethics, and global trade controls.

“Boeing has over 172,000 employees worldwide, so it is important that employees have access to the training virtually, anytime and anywhere they need it,” she said.

In her second week on the job, Mastro was training herself, learning about Captivate, one of the software tools used to develop online courses. She also learned the steps involved in creating virtual courses, from gathering content from subject matter experts to developing the story board and “figuring out how to present it to a wide variety of people around the world, in a way that they can understand the information,” she said, nothing that while working with subject matter experts, she is learning a great deal about business topics in global trade, audit and ethic.

“There are so many opportunities, areas for learning. I’m learning a lot while developing the courses,” she said, crediting her professors at Poole College for providing the knowledge and skills she is now using. “My HR professors –  Paul Mulvey,  Beth Ritter and Clint Davidson – have been extremely influential and incredible teachers and mentors to me. I would not have been able to accomplish all of the things that I have without them,” she said.

When her internship concludes in early August, Mastro will be taking another road trip as she heads back to Raleigh, this time traveling through California with a stop at the Grand Canyon.

Fall semester: SHRM student chapter role, then Study Abroad in the spring

Once back at Poole College, Mastro will begin her role as president of the college’s student chapter of the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). Last year, she had served as vice president of programming, coordinating site visits to places like Red Hat where students learned from a panel how Red Hat uses human resources as a strategic function.

Mastro’s service to the profession through her work in the student chapter, as well as her academic achievements earned her a scholarship from the Raleigh Wake Society of Human Resource Management, a national SHRM affiliate group.

After completing her fall semester at NC State, Mastro will spend her final semester studying abroad at the University of Cork in Ireland.

Mastro’s home town is Concord, N.C.