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Post #12

Yesterday was my last day at the First Solar headquarters in Tempe. I spent most of the day just going to meetings with Sheila, but today we got a chance to talk a little bit more about HR with a broader lense. She basically broke down that within the HR wing, there are several subsects and subdivisions. The major ones are compensation and benefits, talent acquisition, org development and training, and information systems and payroll. Compensation and benefits is in charge of how much each member of the company is paid, and what benefits they get. With regards to benefits, they often to quarterly surveys to figure out what everyone wants. Talent acquisition is in charge of hiring new employees and figuring out what they're looking for in employees, along with refining their hiring strategies. Org development and training is primarily in charge of management and training. They also try to figure out if everyone is happy with their bosses and workplace environment. Sheila went into
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Post #11

May 31st, 2018  Today was one of my favorite days so far. Instead of predominantly following Sheila in HR, I got to follow around Steve in Corporate communications. I sat on a lot of meetings with him, and we also got the chance to chat a lot about what he does. Steve is in charge of all of the corporate communications for First Solar, so he obviously has one of the best perspectives one could have on corporate communications. A big responsibility of corporate communications is to design the core messages and values of the company. In every room I've gone into so far, there's been a sign outlining First Solar's core value and mission. It's cool now to talk to the people that actually made the decisions that went behind those messages. In addition to that, one of the main responsibilities behind what they do is managing internal communications. Getting messages out from one part of the company to another part of the company is essential, and they're the ones who m
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Post #10

May 30th, 2018 Today I had a pretty impactful day at First Solar. As usual, I sat in some interesting meetings with Sheila. I watched her continue the interview process for a new candidate for that HR job that I talked about in a previous entry. That was pretty interesting to see her compare that candidate to the other, but the most exciting part of the day was probably talking to the warranty department. I talked to Rick and Raj of the warranty department, Raj actually being Sheila's spouse. In order to give me the context of what warranty and global sales do, they broke down to me the sales cycle of a plant. Between business development and contract negotiation, the "sales" portion of the cycle can take between 1-2 years. This is the time when the client and First Solar come to an agreement on what they're building, when they're building it, and how much it's going to cost. The next major portion of the sales cycle is actually building the plant. This can
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Post #9 (May 29th 2018)

May 29th, 2018 Yesterday was Memorial Day, so today was the first day this week I went to the First Solar headquarters. Today I spent most of the day with Arjun, an engineer for First Solar who mainly specializes in battery storage. Funny enough, Arjun's is from the same city in India that my family is from. There was a lot of information, numbers, and graphs that I had to digest about battery storage, but I definitely got the gist of what the battery storage team does. Additionally, I also gained an understanding of why they do what they do. So in a traditional plant or storage unit, there's a 24-hour cycle. Throughout the day different amounts and ratios of different types of energy are produced and used. Because the sun is at its peak in the middle of the day, solar energy is usually consumed during the middle of the day. So traditionally, you're going to use fossil fuels (coal) at the beginning and end of the day, but in the middle, you can use predominantly use ener
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Post #8 (May 25th 2018)

Today was my last day of the week going into the First Solar headquarters. I actually went a little bit away from the headquarters during the afternoon to visit a solar site a little north of Tempe in Mesa. But before I did that I talked a little bit more to Shauna about human resources. She talked about what the goals are for human resources in 2018. This year they're doing things a little bit differently. First, they want to tear down as many barriers as they can between the different sections of first solar. Obviously, everyone will still have their roles to play, but they want to encourage group/collaborative work. They also want to promote diversity and inclusion. One of the ways they're putting this into practice is that in talent acquisition (recruiting), they're not asking what school they went to and what year they graduated. There are stereotypes and biases behind associated with colleges. In some case, genders are even linked to college, and they don't want
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Post #7

May 24th, 2018 Today was pretty exciting. Our meetings were very spread out so I got to walk all around the facility, and that was nice. There are so many meeting rooms, and all have them have built-in technology and equipment. The resources of the company are evident just by taking a tour of the place. Today I got an introduction to Human Resources from Shauna. Human resources is the department that Sheila has a major role in. Human resources handles a lot of little things for the company. They have a lot of sections from corporate services which handles day to day things, to support services which handle payroll. Sheila specifically works with information systems connected to HR which are located in Perrysburg. The Comp & Benefits part of HR essentially figures out who gets paid. Shauna went in depth into this. There's a lot of factors. Experience, prestige, role etc. all go into the important decision of how much someone makes at First Solar. Something new the HR is doing
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Post #6

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2018 Today was my third day going to the headquarters of First Solar in Tempe, Arizona. I had more meetings today while getting a closer look at some internal communications of the company, but probably the most significant part of the day was me learning a little more about the science. In a few days, I'll actually be going down and seeing a plant, and it's important that I get some better basic knowledge before that. I had learned a little bit on Monday about the science behind the panels, but I expanded my knowledge today, and I'll continue to do so. Michael and I talked again for a while, and he got a little more technical today. Here's a little more to the breakdown that I learned: The secret recipe film that he alluded too before is sprayed on the entire module (panel), and then they use lasers to cut horizontally apart to create different cells differentiated by the lasers. He said to think about batteries here: if you compile a bunch of b
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