TMC's Internship Program
on Wednesday, July 24, 2024
in
Company News
Today is National Intern Day, and we’re celebrating TMC’s internship program!
TMC offers internships in many areas of our company, including sales, supply chain operations, customer service, and IT. Internships are offered at all of our locations, allowing us to provide opportunities to students from universities around the country. For the summer of 2024, we had 43 interns across the country from 14 different colleges and universities.
Read on to learn more about how internships at TMC help interns gain valuable skills and the role that interns play in our company’s success as a leading flatbed carrier.
Internships at TMC
Interns are generally college students in their junior or senior year who are looking for an opportunity to apply what they have learned in the classroom to real-world challenges in the transportation industry. TMC’s internships offer a mix of training and hands-on work that helps students dive into the work of the largest employee-owned flatbed carrier in the nation and make meaningful contributions to our business.
Interns perform market research, reach out to sales prospects, plan loads of freight, and troubleshoot IT issues, among other tasks. Each intern also gets the chance to go on a field trip, whether to another TMC facility or a customer site, to see other aspects of the work our company does.
Interns work closely with experienced employee-owners to hone their professional skills and their supply chain knowledge. Tucker Caldwell, a logistics sales intern in TMC’s Bentonville, Arkansas, office, says that working with leaders in the supply chain field has been a high point of his internship. “The most valuable aspect of my internship has by far been the amazing people I've worked with, who have a vast amount of industry experience,” Tucker wrote on LinkedIn. “Everyone has been enthusiastic to assist me with anything I need or offer me advice or feedback. I'm working with some of the best in the industry, and it has helped me thrive and grow.”
No matter what functional areas our interns are part of, they have the chance to hone their skills while working on projects that further TMC’s business goals and help them learn about the transportation industry.
Why Internships Matter
Kenny Kyle, Vice President of Campus Collaboration, who oversees the internship program at TMC, believes that internships benefit both TMC and the interns. “Interns learn quite a lot about transportation, and it helps them decide if this is a career they can see themselves in. I believe that success is doing what you want to do, and if we can help these students figure out what they want to do in their lives, then we’ve been successful.”
From Intern to Employee-Owner
Many interns do decide that transportation is where they want to start their careers, and some even opt to transition into full-time positions with TMC.
One such intern-turned-employee-owner is Cameron Devaux, General Manager of Strategic Sourcing. Cameron started as an intern in May of 2018, and he was hired fulltime in December of that year. “Going into the internship, I had zero exposure to transportation or logistics,” he says. “Luckily, the internship gave me a lot of insight into various roles in the company. Having the opportunity to see transportation through the perspective of an asset-based carrier and a brokerage really helped me in my starting role as a Carrier Sales Representative in Logistics.”
Cameron believes that his time as an intern prepared him for success as a supply chain professional. “I was extremely grateful for all the support that I had during my internship,” he notes. “I felt like I could ask any question and if the person helping didn’t have the answer, they would go out of their way to find it.”
This experience made it easy for him to decide to start his career at TMC: “Leading up to graduation, I knew that I wanted to give back to the program that helped develop me. As for culture, it was easy to see that doing the right thing every time was at the core of TMC and everyone who worked here. Being aligned with that made my decision to join TMC even easier.”
Interns Make a Difference at TMC
Kenny says that Cameron’s experience speaks to what every TMC intern experiences. “TMC is a people company, and we care about everyone. There’s no such thing as ‘just an intern.’”
Today we honor the contributions of every TMC intern, past and present, who has played a role in our company’s success. We’re proud to play a role in shaping the next generation of supply chain professionals. Happy National Intern Day!