To tell you the truth, I had no idea what Molex did until I looked up the company’s Wikipedia page shortly after seeing a job posting online. When I was younger, my family used to drive past the campus on Ogden Avenue all the time, but that never enticed me to want to work here. After starting here, however, it didn’t take long for me to realize just how important Molex is in the electronics industry.

As underclassmen college students, young adults are always looking for that big name, consumer company to intern for as a way of boosting their “adolescent egos.” While an internship at a big name company may potentially give your resume a little something extra, all we’re really doing with that title is “one-upping” the kid sitting next to us during the annual Thanksgiving dinner.

During the fall semester of my junior year, I signed up for a B2B (Business-to-Business) Marketing class. On the very first day of class, the professor got up, greeted the class and told us that more than 60% of us would one day end up working in B2B marketing. While most of us believed her, little did we know the importance of B2B in the business world. Those lessons about pipeline generation and value added activities may not have seemed applicable to us then, but have become more and more apparent once I started working at Molex.

My parents emigrated from China in the mid-1980s while in their late 20s, when their main goal was to just be employed. Then years after, they had my brother and me and their sole purpose of working was to make money to support the family. While working at a more recognized company would have been nice, it was never something that was viewed as a priority. In all honesty, I have faced my fair share of uninterested employers from consumer brand name businesses and organizations, as I am sure we all have. However, when the time came for me to make my decision on how I would be spending my summer, I applied to –and ultimately chose– Molex.

It would be a lie to say that I wasn’t impressed with Molex after my first day. The amount of different people moving around, product names and pictures being used and processes going on around me was completely surreal; all of which was just a glimpse of what it takes to make a multi-billion dollar company run smoothly. Despite the fact that Molex has over 37,000 employees, there are thousands of other people and their jobs and businesses that rely on the products we design and/or produce. At Molex, we have a saying where “you are never more than 10 feet away from a Molex product.” It was shortly after I heard that for the first time that I started finding Molex products within my own personal things; like the HSAutoLink ™ Media Module installed in my car or the cable connector in my smart phone. In the grand scheme of things, Molex makes just as big of a difference on people’s lives as the next company, regardless of their brand awareness among consumers.

The company’s positive contribution to the electronics industry isn’t the only thing that makes working here a pleasure. When it comes to employee morale, Molex has done an excellent job balancing the daily workload with the availability of company activities. From bags and volleyball tournaments and company funded marathon and 10k runs, to Relay for Life bake sales and sustainability days hosted by the Molex Environmental Team, every employee can find something that fits their interests.  And it is always nice to see the surprised look on a supplier’s face once they hear about the various activities we have going on at lunch. In all seriousness, it’s not every day you get to see a member of HR swatting the jump shot of a VP who is set to retire at the end of the year or a manager and a board member smack talking about each other’s golf game.

What I speculated would be a quiet and laidback internship this summer, became an eye opening experience set to guide the rest of my professional career. As students entering the finale of their teen years, we tend to fail and see that a job is a job, that B2B is just as important as B2C (Business-to-Consumer) and that paying your bills and generating weekly or monthly income surpasses any friendly Thanksgiving dinner banter. We are blinded by another’s perception of success. As upperclassmen, we start to feel the pressure of finding a job and realize that there are aspects of the business world beyond just a big name, and then we start to see the value a business can be to us, and vice versa.