Back at the start of the summer, I wrote a post, Where the Next Generation Takes Flight: The JSSI Internship Experience, where each of us picked one word for how we were feeling walking in. The words were hopeful: eager, motivated, confident. They were the sound of an optimistic group of people who had no idea how the summer was going to go.
Now we’re at the other end of it, and I got everyone on camera to see where we landed. The words are different now: grounded and reflective. Somewhere between the projects, the lakefront sunsets, and being in good company, that first-day hope rang true.
This blog post is a recap of our summer internship experience, highlighting our journey and what we took away from it.
One more word
Since Where the Next Generation Takes Flight captured how we all felt on the way in, I wanted to catch us on the way out. So, I went around and filmed everyone: a quick intro, the word for how they’re feeling now that it’s ending, and one piece of advice they’d pass to the next class of interns.
- Kenni Sovey, Parts & Engines: Grateful
- Kelsey Vernon, Marketing: Eye-opening
- Augustine Van den Berch Van Heemstede, Business Operations: Thankful
- Ivan Adamchuk, Tax: Inspired
- Dominic Schuster, Client Services: Proud
- Daniel Cirone, Aviation Capital: Sure
- Antonio Hattaway, Client Services: Fulfilled
- Christopher Runde, Business Operations: Fulfilled
- Eric Moncada-Guevara, Accounting: Inspired
- Aiman Boullaouz, IT: Satisfied
- Christian Cairo, Parts & Engines: Grateful
- Kyle Vernon, Parts & Engines: Achieved
- Michael Herman, Operations Support: Capable
Day one: excited (and a little nervous)
We came in looking forward to real work in our fields, a summer in Chicago, and almost every one of us said it, meeting each other. Christian was after “work experience that relates to my major,” Michael couldn’t wait to dig into the acquisition and financial analysis of aircraft, and Aiman was genuinely excited to see how AI agents get built and deployed inside a real business. Ivan wanted to see the tax and aviation world in real life, not just learning about it in school.
Of course there were a few first-day butterflies mixed in, but they quickly went away as we experienced the welcoming company culture. For Antonio, the nerves were in everything at once: “dorm housing, an office, a corporation, a new city, business aviation.” Dominic wondered if he’d be “in over my head.” Kenni and Kyle both had a knot about navigating a big city for the first time, and Christian had a particular one: he was our only intern out at the warehouse, on his own in a state he’d never lived in.
Nonetheless, we were all excited to jump in, learn, and contribute as much as possible.
The projects we worked on
One of the best parts of this experience was that the work we did genuinely mattered and added value to our respective teams.
Christopher built an enterprise AI knowledge system for JSSI, and he’s proud of a detail most people would overlook: “It works without me. I designed the framework so anyone can update it independently, which means the system outlives my internship.”
Kenni learned the sales system so well she contributed to “over $50,000 in sales.”
Michael delivered a full valuation on a CL-604, weighing going-concern value against a teardown/part-out, the kind of analysis that supports a real acquisition.
I implemented better marketing tracking systems to understand our performance across campaigns.
Dominic got to exercise his entrepreneurial spirit by creating and proposing a business idea.
Antonio built a tool that strips a big chunk of manual labor out of his department. Ivan and Daniel did the same on the capital and tax sides, turning manual processes into actual tools that save teams time every quarter.
Eric took on the unbilled flight-hour project.
Christian wrote an emergency evacuation plan for the warehouse, so every employee’s safety was accounted for.
Augustin jumped into his department’s effort to clean up and redesign Salesforce, which he called “the software around which every BU works.”
And Aiman got to sit in on development meetings where teams debated orchestration strategies and evaluation frameworks for AI agents in a live business setting.
Ask Kyle which project he was proudest of and he won’t pick one: “All of them. They all felt actually impactful and important to my team.”
Across departments, the through-line was the same: the work was real, and it mattered.
What we learned (that they don't teach in a classroom)
The projects taught skills, but the bigger lessons were about how a business actually runs.
Eric came away understanding how heavily business aviation leans on maintenance programs: engine-hour tracking, vendor coordination, customer portals, and internal accounting all working in sync. Antonio was struck by the sheer scale of it, calling it impressive “how much goes into the upkeep.” Aiman learned to break a huge problem into actual tasks and to work across teams, something he says he “wasn’t used to coming from school.” Christian picked up the shipping-and-receiving side of selling aircraft parts and engines, plus learned to use tools like Excel and AvSight. Ivan mentioned how our intern trips to Oshkosh and the Kentucky warehouse gave him a real feel for the aviation side of the business, not just the numbers. Kenni, who’s in pilot school, got a look at aviation “behind the desk,” and Kyle walked away realizing just how new and competitive the industry really is. For me, the biggest takeaway was learning how marketing departments operate in B2B industries.
Lunch with the executives
The executive lunches turned out to be a highlight, mainly because the leaders were so candid about their own winding paths. Aiman was fascinated by the path of JSSI Chairman and CEO Neil Book, who started out in software and kept turning experience into new opportunities. Kenni couldn’t get over the journey of Carly Anderson, JSSI’s General Counsel and Chief Legal, Strategy, and Human Resources Officer: ‘The career changes and experience she had, and the impact she made, were so inspiring.”
The advice stuck so well that people were repeating them to each other for weeks. Kenni’s favorite line: “Create the relationship before you need the transaction.” Christopher’s takeaway was that your name is your greatest asset: take care of your connections and you build relationships that pay off for years. Eric put it simply: connections are where mentorship and job opportunities live. Kyle’s was refreshingly blunt: don’t be scared to take risks and be good at making your boss’s life easier.
There was a bigger shift, too. A lot of us walked in expecting standard “Corporate America” and walked out seeing something else entirely. As Kenni put it, “JSSI is such an entrepreneurial environment,” and Kyle, who already knew the company was growing, said the lunches made him realize just how fast. When Neil turned the table around and asked us where we thought the company should head next, it was clear that no matter how junior, the ideas of every JSSI employee matter.
Giving back at Lurie Children's Hospital
As part of the internship experience, we got to choose a volunteer project of our own. So, one afternoon, we got together to build activity and room-decor packages for kids at Lurie Children’s Hospital: coloring books, wall stickers, clay, card games, all the good stuff meant to make a hospital room feel a little more like a kid’s own space. We packed them on-site and dropped them off at the Panda Cares center, where the kids come to play and hang out.
It was the kind of thing that put this summer into perspective. After weeks of valuations and sales systems and AI tools, spending an afternoon stuffing a box with clay and stickers for a kid who could use a good day was a pretty easy way to remember that there is more to life than working. We felt lucky to be able to give back, and it’s a mindset we’re taking with us.
Our Chicago summer
Here’s the part we basically wrote for each other. Ask anyone in our class about their favorite spot, and you’ll get the same answer over and over: the lakefront by the Adler Planetarium, and the Saturday night fireworks we watched from it. Long after we’ve left, that stretch of lakefront will still hold memories of our summer in the city, and everyone we shared it with.
Christopher’s routine was an afternoon walk to the Planetarium to catch the sunset: “very relaxing, and the views were amazing, I highly recommend it.” Aiman jogged the lakefront on weekends and caught the fireworks with friends: “These routines make it easy to come back Monday morning refreshed.” Kenni fell for Buckingham Fountain: “I like to watch the sunset there and see all the city lights come on.” She spent the rest of her time chasing down her first Chicago Dog, recreating scenes from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and hitting every museum she could find. Kyle discovered sightseeing as a hobby now. Augustin got seriously into photography. Ivan kept up his swimming and settled into a steady gym routine, and his favorite small ritual was grabbing coffee at Sawada with a coworker, a little thing that became something to look forward to. Dominic filled his days exploring and had a soft spot for stopping in at firehouses just to say hi to the crews.
But if you ask any of us what really made the summer, it’s each other. No matter what the day held, that was the part everyone came back to. Eric put it best: the intern dinners at the University Center “helped us all get closer and become great friends.” Michael’s favorite part of any day was just getting to see and hanging out with the rest of us. Antonio said it was being able to grab dinner with whoever left the office around the same time and go explore the city together, which is “what really made the summer memorable.” Christopher had his crew, Dom, Gus, and Kyle, who in his words “were good fun and we would always get up random things.”
And now?
Remember those hopeful words we picked back in June? Here’s how the same people sound on the way out.
Kenni’s is a single line: “A longing to come back.” She’s already planning to visit Chicago, stay in touch with her supervisor, and keep building on what she learned, and she’s more sure than ever about becoming a corporate pilot.
Antonio found something he didn’t expect: “a passion in aviation I hadn’t expected to get,” now aiming at aviation and business law.
Christopher learned to take feedback without taking it personally: “being able to delineate that from my work product has helped me.”
Dominic is walking away with friends he might never have met and real confidence in himself.
Eric feels surer than ever about accounting, Augustin is now eyeing a future in data analytics, Michael is chasing the transactions-and-financing side of business aircraft, and Christian found whole new paths in sales and supply chain he didn’t know existed.
Similarly, I was exposed to a new realm of marketing that I see myself pursuing in the future. Ivan is set on the tax path, with technology right alongside it.
We came in with one set of words and we’re leaving with another, but every one of us is pointed somewhere new.
Thank you
To my fellow interns, thank you for the projects, the lunches full of banter, the boxes we made for the kids at Lurie’s, and several lakefront sunsets and adventures. Getting to document this summer meant I got a front-row seat to all of it, and I’m so glad the people in these photos and clips are the ones I got to spend it with. We came in as strangers and we’re leaving as friends, which makes it hard to say goodbye.
And to the students reading this and wondering whether to apply: in Christopher’s words, “there’s no reason in the world not to do this internship.”
