Meet Kevin
Internship: LTI SmartGlass
College: Williams
A Lenox native and a Williams College student, Kevin Coakley was already very familiar with the Berkshires when he applied to intern at LTI SmartGlass, a glass and mirror manufacturer in Pittsfield, Mass. He had originally entertained the thought of looking for work in a bigger city, but decided to stay in the Berkshires the summer after his sophomore year. He thought the LTI internship would afford him a new opportunity while also staying close to home.
The internship offered him a lot of new experience because he was doing a bit of everything. “My title was basically just ‘intern’,” Kevin explained. “LTI is a manufacturing company and a significant amount of the internship was being on the floor and learning about the business …then bringing ideas into the office. I’d say [the internship] was about a 50-50 factory and office setting.”
As an economics major, Kevin did not initially see himself working in the manufacturing industry, but he quickly began to enjoy his internship and the autonomy he had as an intern. On top of his duties on the factory floor, he spent a lot of time at the drawing board coming up with ideas, as well as talking to experts and pitching ideas to LTI’s management in terms of how to run the company. “There was a lot of freedom where I could talk to the workers directly and hear what they liked and didn’t like and make decisions that way,” he said.
Kevin currently works a full time position as an investment operations associate at Cambridge Associates , an asset management firm in Boston. His job primarily involves extracting datasets from documents and sending them to the rest of his team members, as well as plenty of meetings discussing data analysis.
Though his internship at LTI was in a very different industry than his current career path,Kevin attributes the skills he learned at his internship to why he is successful at his job today.
“The soft skills definitely carry over a lot,” he said. “I think that the LTI internship has helped me with teamwork, compromise, and resilience. If this was my first job, I would find everything I do very exhausting, but my internship prepared me for that.”
