Raymond Kha participated in the Spring 2006 San Francisco BizAcademy and was an intern in the salesforce.com Sales Operations Department.  He shares his thoughts on the program and on having a mentor.

My name is Raymond Kha and I participated in BizAcademy Spring 2006.  I am currently in my third year at San Francisco State University as an accounting major.  While attending SFSU, I came across something interesting that my professor once said.  My professor was claiming that “planning” a career path isn’t very difficult.  The secret is to figure out how to get from point A to point B, where point A represents where we are now and point B represents where we want to be.  The problem with this “plan” is that many of us, including myself, don’t know where point B is.  I know for a fact that somewhere along my career path from point A to point B includes my college experience and my experience with Salesforce.

In fall 2007, I accepted an internship that was offered to us BizAcademy graduates.  For one and a half years now, I worked in the Sales Operations Document Management Department.  Because of this internship, I have learned a lot about the Salesforce application, what Salesforce does as a company, and the process of order management. Not only was I amazed at the number of companies that use the Salesforce application, but also the application’s capabilities.  In addition, I was able to relate and experience some of the things I study as a business student, such as C-level infrastructure and parts of Salesforce’s business strategy. 

I was also fortunate enough for the Foundation to find me a mentor, Tim Anderson.  We typically met about twice a month, just to talk and to grab lunch together.  For about a year now, Tim has been helping me both mentally and academically.  Like every typical college student, I go though a lot of stress and problems in my life.  By talking out some of these problems with Tim, I feel a bit relieved because I’m “getting it out of my system” and the fact that I’m not talking to a tree.  In addition, Tim has always offered to read my papers and provided me feedback on how I can improve on my papers.  Aside from all this, we went bowling at Yerba Buena and to a Giants game for some fun. Despite the fact that I am a weird and boring person, Tim is a pretty cool person to “chill” with and genuinely tries to find something fun that we could do.

With this all being said, the Foundation has certainly made a difference in my life by giving me the opportunity to an internship and going through the trouble of find me a mentor.  Because of the relationship I share with Salesforce, I actually get excited when professors at my school talk about the company in their lectures.