They may have been interns, but iSchool students working at Alaska Airlines this summer say they felt more like peers, working side-by-side with co-workers to identify and solve major problems in the Information and Technology Services division (ITS). Their contributions had substantial impact. One intern proposed advanced technology for baggage tracking that could shave up to 15 minutes off the handling process. Others created new guidelines that will speed up delivery of mobile apps within the company and developed software aimed at greater customer satisfaction and fewer operational hitches, including flight delays.

Managers were impressed – so impressed that they rejiggered budgets in order to offer all eight iSchool interns part-time jobs, an unprecedented move at the company. “We had allotted only three jobs for interns on the part-time basis, but when we went to decide on which three, no one wanted to let their intern go,” says Alaska Airlines Senior ITS Recruiter Lani Pedersen. “They have all just knocked our socks off – far beyond our expectations.”

Interns also gave the experience a thumbs-up – both for the opportunities offered them and for the inclusive culture they found at Alaska Airlines. They felt part of their teams and felt their ideas were respected, interns report.

“From the get-go, everyone was very welcoming. They were quick to bring me up to speed, to fill me in on their projects, and to help me figure out how I could help. They let me do things that took trust on their part,” says iSchool Informatics student Peter Lu.

Interns did face the challenge of navigating a complex corporate environment, where new-gen break-out ideas can clash with established ways of doing things. ”It’s hard to be traditional in a field that is always changing,” notes one intern.

But gaps were bridged and channels opened as iSchool students rolled up their sleeves and went to work, ending their 11-week internship with polished “report-out” presentations Sept. 2 before company managers and executives.

 “Their presentations were absolutely awesome,” says Kris Kutchera, the recently retired Alaska Airlines ITS Vice President who oversaw the summer intern program. “The kinds of projects they worked on and the contributions they made were just amazing in terms of tangible things that we really needed to have done.”

Kutchera says the company -- which is revamping to become “the easiest airline to fly by 2017” -- wanted to increase its capacity in mobile social data and cloud service fields. The new fields required fresh thinking and new cutting-edge skills — skills she saw in evidence in the iSchool’s Informatics program, where she focused her attention for this year’s expanded intern roster. “We are less concerned about coding these days and more concerned about design, architecture, user experience, and delivery of project,” says Kutchera, who sits on the iSchool’s Founding Board.  “We felt the iSchools’ informatics program was a good fit for that.”

Six iSchool informatics students and two graduate students from the Master of Science in Information Management program made it through the formal selection process at Alaska Airlines.

“Half of the interns we hired were women, and there was a lot of ethnic diversity in the mix. That’s something I really like about the iSchool, the amount of diversity. It’s a good pool to be drawing from,” says Kutchera, who was recently joined on the iSchool Founding Board by Alaska Airlines Chief Information Officer Veresh Sita.

The paid internships began with a full-immersion orientation that gave students a nuts-and-bolts look at what’s involved in managing, on average, almost 900 flights per day at Alaska Airlines.

“It’s incredible when you think of all the pieces that have to come together perfectly to get a flight off,” says Kutchera. “Everything has to happen at the right time. The interns got a real appreciation for that.”

After their orientation, interns quickly put iSchool coursework to work, from database management lessons to practiced ways of working collectively on projects.

“At the iSchool, we are constantly doing projects and interacting with each other, and that allowed me to grow in how I worked with people at Alaska,” says Informatics undergraduate Memie Huang, whose goal is to become a UX (user experience) designer.

She had the chance to try on that career full-time this summer as a UX intern working on mobile design guidelines -- guidelines that will make employees’ multiple apps more consistent and easier to use. As lead on the project, she used job shadowing, journey mapping, wire-framing, user flows, and testing to accumulate the user data that informed design decisions.

“I was able to really take control of this project,” says Huang, who has accepted part-time work at the company as a junior interaction designer. “As an intern you think, ‘Is what I’m doing really good enough?’ This project validated all the hard work I’ve put into developing my UX design skills. It empowered me,” she says.

Managers at Alaska Airlines, named one of the nation’s 100 most technologically innovative companies by InformationWeek, worked hard to match student interests with meaningful projects. For informatics student Michael Dang, whose concentration is cybersecurity and information assurance, that meant taking on multiple roles. He worked on security guidelines for mobile development and developed an automatic testing framework for Web services that helps ensure online customers have positive experiences booking reservations, checking bags, and doing upgrades. He also worked on a mobile location awareness tool that could, among other things, alert travelers with mobile devices who get to the airport long before takeoff that there is an earlier flight available.

The work opened Dang’s eyes to new career possibilities. “When I went to the iSchool, I was not sure about what I wanted to do: Do I want to do cybersecurity or software development? Working at Alaska gave me a better sense of how those two are integrated,” says Dang, who accepted a part-time programmer II position at the company.

Intern Peter Lu found an exciting career path in an area he would have never expected: baggage. Nobody thinks about it, he says. Neither had he, until he was presented with the challenge of creating a new way of looking at it. “I started working on getting new technology into an area of the aviation industry that has been ignored,” says Lu.

One of his projects focused on employing electronic bag tags that would allow both passengers and airline employees to track any particular piece of luggage through the handling process, reducing mishandling problems and speeding up processing. Permanent electronic tags could also eliminate laborious check-in procedures, says Lu. “It’s a cool way to streamline the process and get through the airport as quickly as possible.”

To explore the idea, Lu and his manager flew to Las Vegas’s McCarran International Airport, one of the first to try out the radio frequency identification (RFID) bag tags. The iSchool intern, now a part-time technical requirements analyst at the company, was also flown to Minneapolis for an International Air Transport Association convention with leading international carriers and vendors.

“I was sitting there thinking, ‘This is a crazy internship. I’m in touch with people who will be setting policies that will have effects worldwide,” says Lu. “At that moment, I realized this is the industry and the community I want to fall into.”

Like many other iSchool interns, Lu spent his weekend off-hours over the summer taking advantage of one of Alaska Airlines’ greatest employee perks: free one-way stand-by flights to any of its 104 destinations – a benefit extended to the 2015 summer interns. They were quickly up, up, and away, some leaving Friday after work and returning Monday morning. Kutchera reports that, during the 11-week internship, one iSchool student managed 22 one-way flights.

Lu’s personal itinerary included Maui, Orange County, Mexico, Boston, and, in Alaska, Anchorage and Barrow, with a Prudhoe Bay stopover.  “It was awesome to feel like part of the jet-set,” he says. “It expanded the idea of how small the world really is.”