Starting in a new role is never easy. But Josh Taban, Class of 2022, found his stride, both as a transfer student to the Fox School and as a new intern at Cigna. In this four-part series, Fox students share their experiences with summer internships and provide valuable advice for their peers.
Josh Taban, Global Procurement & Third Party Management Intern at Cigna
Taban is a fourth-year student at the Fox School who transferred in from Montgomery County Community College earlier in his academic career. While initially a business major, his love for quantitative analysis guided him to pursue a double major in marketing and supply chain management at Temple. Now, not only is Taban a member of the Supply Chain Association at the Fox School, but he also serves as president of the Fox Online Student Association, where he helps create events and workshops for online students.
When searching for summer internships, Taban prioritized applying to positions that would grant experience with supply chain management before he graduated. The extensiveness of his search process illustrates Taban’s commitment to achieving his goals:
“I used many different resources to search for internships—not just one. I kept an eye out and searched up to a year ahead, and kept a list of all of the positions I’d applied for. I used a lot of different search platforms, like Handshake, WayUp, Google Job Search and LinkedIn. I applied to some companies I had a contact with, and if I didn’t, I made new contacts on LinkedIn to ask about internship programs.”
Taban’s hard work paid off when he landed the Global Procurement & Third Party Management internship at Cigna, a global health services company. The internship had everything Taban was looking for—not only was it with a renowned healthcare company that dealt with supply chains, but it also involved analytics, which he was passionate about.
Aside from working onsite for the first and last week of the internship, Taban’s role was completely remote. This workstyle offered him the freedom to independently travel around the country as he completed his internship but didn’t mean his job was easy. Taban admits he may have been a little overwhelmed during his first few days as an intern. He was dealing with really complex systems and there was a lot to learn about the project he was working on. Thankfully, Taban’s supportive teammates helped him get acclimated quickly.
In his role, Taban primarily supported the work of a data analytics team at Cigna. Specifically, he created tools that helped his team proactively assess data quality in their supply chain. Taban attributed his self-learning as a big part of why he was able to fill this role. Using LinkedIn Learning through Temple’s Knowledge Base, Taban had taken several courses to learn Business Intelligence tools, Excel, SPSS and other platforms that all helped him excel at Cigna.
When searching for internships and preparing for the future, Taban wants his peers to realize the value of taking initiative: “It’s important to build relationships, to expose yourself to different experiences and to take advantage of different resources at Temple to build skills. Just try to make the most of your time. Graduation comes really fast and you want to be able to have accomplished something while in school—don’t wait.”