My experience

Overview

Interns are assigned a mentor to show them the ropes. You interact tons with your mentor on a daily basis and really get to know them. Interns are allowed to work from home, with various levels of flexibility depending on the department you were in. Some other interns worked from home every friday, I worked from home very rarely. I performed the same duties a full-time employee would- sat at the same type of desk with my team, attended all the same meetings as my mentor, and performed tests and experiments my mentor would. I traveled on several business trips, two by car and one by air, and generally felt like I got to see a ton of the company. Seminars and such were often hosted by the company, and I felt like I grew a lot professionally in many different ways. My work was meaningful but also definitely a full 40-hour load. While some weeks may have been a little bit less than 40 hours, oftentimes a deadline would come up and I would work a little more than 40 hours. At the end of the term, I gave a technical 30-minute presentation to my peers and coworkers and a 10 minute leadership presentation (both PPTs) to the heads of our divison. The end of the internship got really busy and I felt like I was really scrambling to keep up with everything. I would say if you worked here full time there would definitely be weeks where you'd be putting in more than 40 hours, but overall the company culture is very family- oriented and people understand when you need to take time off to do things like daycare. While there were a few hard weeks here and there, it was mostly an enjoyable experience every day and I didn't feel overworked.

THIS IS NOT A CO-OP! THIS IS AN INTERNSHIP! For Georgia Tech students: My position title was a co-op, so I registered as a co-op for Georgia Tech's CareerBuzz website. This got me in a bunch of trouble as I didn't get a return offer from Kimberly-Clark (it seems quite difficult to get one as KC fills all their internship slots very early on with new interns so by the time you've decided you'd like to stick around you might find that there are no spots available). Because I had no return offer from KC, I am now blocked from applying to any jobs on CareerBuzz. To this day, 4 months after the end of my internship, I am still waiting for a reply from my boss at KC to confirm to my career adviser that I do not have a return offer so that I can be allowed to apply to jobs. I was totally happy with KC while I was there, but now find it absolutely impossible to get anyone in their college recruiting team to actually help me now that I'm gone. Definitely soured my impression of them.