Intern to Principal® employee: How 2 students made a big move

Making coffee and collating copies were most definitely not on the agenda for Kyle Corbin and Lydia White (pictured above) during their Principal^® internships. One of Corbin’s projects was a model that forecasted the performance of a bond portfolio. White completed a complex date conversion coding assignment for the front-end development experience.

“At every single internship, I worked on something interesting and meaningful to the enterprise and to my development,” Corbin says.

Internships gave them both insight into what full-time work at Principal might look like—and made the decision to join the company after graduation obvious. Corbin is now a financial analyst and White is a software engineer. “There are so many opportunities to network and build skills as an intern,” White says. “If you take the time and are intentional, you can succeed as a full-time employee.”

Real-world work, as an intern

Each year’s cohort of Principal interns belies easy categorization. There are typically about 200 people selected from thousands of applicants, hailing from a majority of the U.S. states. Some work a traditional summer, while others stretch assignments over longer periods or return in succeeding years for multiple opportunities. In previous years, recruits came mainly from Iowa schools, but today’s class is just as likely to be enrolled at a college or university outside of the state.

After high school, Corbin, a Waukee, Iowa, native, joined the Marine Corps for five years; when he left the service, he enrolled at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, to study finance and analytics. His first Principal internship—one of seven—came during his freshman year.

Interns generally are placed in one of eight professional communities including technology, actuarial, and real estate. Recruiting for the intern program begins in late summer or the fall with different departments forecasting needs as well as capabilities.

Corbin’s wide-ranging intern experiences during summers and school years crossed business units and skill sets, from correlation studies in the Benefits and Protection business to developing a risk analysis dashboard for Retirement and Income Solutions (RIS). The commonality was the rich opportunity to gain insight into not just Principal, but a career path. “Whether I decided to stay at Principal or not, those experiences gave me an industry understanding of what I wanted to do and work on,” Corbin says.

That’s by design, says Tanner Mote, internship program manager at Principal. “We pride ourselves on ensuring that our interns really have an experiential learning opportunity,” Mote says. “Can they apply technical and soft skills to real work assignments? We want to make sure they can see what it feels like to be in a role and ask themselves if Principal is a company they want to work for.”

Flexibility in where you can go

Building a network while also amassing skills and developing careers remain the tenets of the program, says Mote. That may include rotations such as Corbin’s as well as immersion in Principal culture through events like the Global Inclusion Summit and social outings.

White, who majored in computer science and minored in graphic design, marketing, and information systems, had two different summer internships after both her sophomore and junior years at Drake. Her first—an entirely remote experience in 2020—delivered a connection that would prove invaluable to both her second internship and her eventual hire.

“For RIS technology interns, there’s a virtual buddy system—a person not part of your team who is there as a resource to answer questions and make other connections,” White, a Minneapolis native, says. “My buddy knew I was interested in user experience (UX) and connected me with a networking lunch and an opportunity to directly contribute to a UX project. It made me realize there’s a lot of networking and flexibility in where you can go and what you can contribute to. I still have lunch with her—three years later.”

Mote, who was an intern before transitioning to full-time, found that to be true—then and now. “Interns here shouldn’t be afraid to reach out to people they want to know,” Mote says. “I’ve yet to run into any barriers in my career mobility or development. You just have to ask the right question to find the right resource.”

Two careers, launched

White received an offer letter from Principal before her senior year and carefully considered her skills, interests, and near-term life plan. For example, her study abroad plans had been canceled because of the pandemic, but she still considered living elsewhere. She also wanted some time between graduation and the start of work.

A negotiated start date gave White the summer off; she accepted the offer knowing there was a lot she could do in the future at Principal. “There’s flexibility here. I like coding, but I have other work passions too, and I want to gain experience to have the chance to transition to a different role or even in a different location,” she says. “It’s such a great base to launch my career.”

At graduation, Corbin had seven offers. In the end, Principal won out; his daily focus is now the intersection between strategy, business, and finance. “I was purposeful during my internships about what I was working on and developing a network of people to learn what teams and leaders were like,” he says. “Principal always worked with me on interest, needs, and constraints, and I didn’t have a single bad experience.”

The internship opened doors, but the culture at Principal also won Corbin over. “You will likely spend more time in your career and at work than you will at home, and I wanted the company I work for—its employees and leadership—to be a place that is trying to do the best they can, even when there are challenging times and hard moments,” he says.