Internship Spotlight: Jay Choi ’27, Amazon

Internship company name and location: Amazon, Charlotte, North Carolina
Hometown: Fairfax County, Virginia
Pronouns: he/him/his
The SOM class you're using on the job: Operations Engine
Go-to work lunch: Burgers, Chinese food, and sushi
After-work routine: Exercising and exploring town
Favorite thing about internship city: The nature! Lake Norman is a 34,000-acre man-made lake with roughly 600 miles of shoreline, and there's water, mountains, and woods everywhere you look.

This summer, I’m an operations manager intern at Amazon in Charlotte, North Carolina, part of the MBA Pathways program for MBAs going into operations. Instead of working in a corporate office, I’m based in a fulfillment center, embedding with the site’s operations leaders. My classroom for the summer has been the floor itself.

Day to day, my job requires me to be a translator between the associates on the floor and the numbers on the screen. A plan is only as good as the shift it survives, and no shift goes exactly to plan—volume, equipment, and people all have other ideas. So the work is walking the floor, listening to the people who know it best, reading the data, and helping the team adjust in real time without losing its calm. Associates with a decade of experience on the floor have taught me more about leadership than any dashboard.

My intern project—a key part of the internship experience, through which I proposed new processes for the site where I worked—lives inside one of those everyday operational decisions. I spent weeks on the floor understanding how the decision actually gets made and who it affects, then worked on making it faster and more consistent for the managers who own it. The specifics stay inside Amazon, but the lessons I learned will travel anywhere: Watch the work before you model it, earn the trust of the people who do it, and only then build the thing they would actually want to use.

SOM prepared me for this summer in a way I didn’t fully appreciate until I was on the floor. The comprehensive, holistic curriculum trained me to grasp the bigger organizational picture—a skill that made all the difference when I was leading at a scale I’d never experienced before. The course Operations Engine gave me the vocabulary for flow, bottlenecks, and variability, so the building made sense to me faster than it otherwise would have. And Managing Groups and Teams turned out to matter just as much, because every operational problem eventually resolves into a people problem: who is where, who knows what, and who needs support right now.

I sought out an internship with Amazon because of my long-standing fascination with efficiency mechanisms and the engineering of truly great operations. I’ve spent time on the operating side before, both in the military and at early-stage startups, where I built processes from scratch. But after gaining lots of experience in improvisation, I wanted to experience the most deliberately structured operation there is, at full scale. Amazon treats operations as a craft. Its leadership principles aren’t wall posters; people genuinely refer to them in everyday decisions. Watching concepts like “Dive Deep” and “Earn Trust” function as working vocabulary rather than slogans has been a highlight.

More than anything, the internship pushed me to think in a more logical, strategic way. In an operation moving this fast, you have to build systems and processes that hold up as the pace picks up. That shift from “execute the task” to “design the system that handles the task” is something I’m carrying back to SOM and into my post-graduation life. Watching a world-class operation convert individual judgment into repeatable mechanisms, day after day, is exactly the education I was after. It also sharpened my understanding of what I want to do with my SOM education: build and operate great systems.

What’s made the learning curve manageable is the people: Everyone here has been genuinely kind and down to earth, so even on the busiest days, the culture stays chill. A few of my SOM classmates are interning nearby, and we’ve met up for meals and plans around the city. There’s something grounding about comparing summers in mid-July with people who sat next to you in the core. It’s a nice reminder that the relationships show up even when you’re states away from New Haven.

If there’s one thing I’d share about this experience, it’s that this kind of hands-on work is humbling in the best way. Depending on how much you embrace the onsite work, you might find yourself in a hard hat and steel-toe safety shoes every single day. No case write-up prepares you for standing in the middle of the processes you’ve only modeled before, and I’m grateful to the associates and operators who were my teachers for the summer. They hold a standard I’ve rarely seen anywhere else, while being extremely generous to an intern with a lot of questions. I’m leaving my internship with a respect for operations leadership I could only have gained from experiencing it firsthand.