Transfer student Aaliyah Thomas knew she wanted a change of academic scenery. The senior computer science major from Belleville wanted to get closer to home than she was at Purdue, and she wanted better opportunities. Right away, she knew it was a good move. 

“Within the first month here I got this internship,” she said.

Thomas was selected, along with four other Illinois State University School of Information Technology students, to join GROWMARK’S IT Innovation Internship team. Her fellow Redbird interns include: Tristan Cravens, Julia Everett, Carl Ghess, and Josh Soglo.

“It was a year ago, September 17, 2024, that I got in front of GROWMARK reps at the IT intern fair,” she said. “At Purdue, that would have been impossible. There would have been 200 people in line in front of me.”

Thomas admitted that she did not know much about agriculture.

“But I researched several of the companies participating before the IT Internship Fair at the Bone,” she said.

Her diligence paid off as the intern experience has her feeling that finding a career path in a corporate setting is more real and much less abstract than before.  

“It’s been a very impactful experience for me,” Thomas said. “I worked very well with the members of our team and enjoyed being part of a team. It improved my communication skills working with a team, and I learned how much I can bring to a project.”

Thomas started the internship in mid-May and said she liked the people and the way GROWMARK does business, calling it a great place to work. She was impressed by how much confidence supervisors had in their interns.

“That was my favorite thing about it,” she said. “They gave us a lot of leniency and encouraged us to make our own decisions.”

That was no accident, according to Leland Roling ’05, GROWMARK’s director of Information Systems Development and the founder of the internship program.

“We are looking for someone who has the capability to make decisions on their own and who is not afraid to fail,” Roling said. “No. 1, we’re looking for people who are able to learn things quickly. If you do fail, well, at least you did it fast.

“We don’t like people who are gun shy. We want people who are willing to try everything.”

Roling, who majored in computer information systems at Illinois State, was inducted into the 2024 College of Applied Science and Technology (CAST)’s Hall of Fame for Information Technology. He now directs the program that he started and has worked closely with Illinois State over the last several years. He’s involved with deciding who is hired and how the program runs.

Cravens, also a senior computer science major, is from Gifford. He did bring an agriculture background to the internship.

“I grew up in an ag setting,” he said. “My mom’s parents had a farm, and my dad’s parents farm and raise cows. This was a chance to combine my background in agriculture and my interest in technology.” 

The interns worked 40-hour weeks during the summer. Cravens found his way to GROWMARK as Thomas did via the IT Internship Fair. He said it’s been a great experience.

“The culture at GROWMARK is amazing,” he said. “I think going into it I had a false stereotype of what corporate life is like, but my experiences this summer showed me those stereotypes are not always true.”

Cravens said the student recruitment team was great about getting all the interns—49 in all from 22 schools—together, which he said was fun. He enjoyed meeting other students who traveled from their GROWMARK internships in Iowa, Ohio, New Mexico, and Canada. His favorite thing was helping develop a corn yield estimator mobile app.

“We’re still working on the app,” he said. “The goal is to have the app run entirely on a mobile phone, with no reliance on an internet connection or outside computing. The broad goal is for a user to be able to take a photo of an ear of corn, and based on that photo, it will give the farmer an estimate of yield for that field.”

Cravens enjoyed the challenge of combining the use of algorithms, concepts of machine learning, and then training and testing the machine learning models. 

“Our team picked from a list of projects that were all interesting,” he said. “This was learning on the fly for me because I hadn’t used machine learning or delved into it before.”

Thomas also enjoyed the work the team did on the yield estimator app and is excited about what a valuable tool it has the potential to be.

“I liked how I was able to be part of a project that can have an impact on real life,” she said. “The app also includes an offline functionality, so you don’t have to be near a connection if you’re out in the field where there’s very low service.”

Roling, who serves as vice chair of the Business and Industry Advisory Council advisory committee through CAST, said the interns produce actual, real projects that bring value to the company. He added that they also help get these projects done faster.

“We’ve been extremely successful with this program,” he said. “We’ve converted quite a few interns into employees. The big piece for us is it helps us train future employees who are ready to go as soon as they get out of college.”