Justin Debolt ran financial planning for IHG’s Americas region while finishing his degree, and used what he was learning in class to lead a team split between Atlanta and Guadalajara.
How did you get your internship?
I didn’t apply for this one. I’ve been with IHG and its brands for more than twelve years, and I took over as Head of Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) Americas in September 2024. When I went back to finish my degree, I found out the internship course lets you build around a job you already have, as long as you expand the scope and set real learning goals. So I sat down with my boss and we wrote a plan that added two workstreams outside my normal lane. He signed on as my site supervisor and we were off.
What is unique about your situation that influenced your internship selection or experience?
I’m a mid-career guy finishing a degree I started a long time ago. I worked in a hotel café, served in the Army working on Apache helicopters, and then moved through operations, accounts payable, and finance jobs in a handful of cities before I landed in corporate finance. I showed up to this internship with about twenty years of experience and no diploma, so an internship meant something different for me. I wasn’t learning what a job looks like. I was looking for better ways to explain things I’d been doing on instinct for years.
What kind of work did you do throughout your internship experience?
I lead a team of 13 that plans and forecasts for roughly 4,600 hotels across the Americas. Most of the job is building the numbers and then translating them for people who have about 10 minutes to listen. Over the summer I owned the growth and Revenue Per Available Room (RevPAR) package for our Regional CFO, which ran close to 80 slides. I led our Q3 business review from planning through the final position, and I picked up the finance business partner role for the 2027 GM Conference, which sits completely outside my normal scope and put me in rooms with Legal and Procurement. The last piece was people work, pulling our nearshore team in Guadalajara fully into the Americas team.
How did your coursework help prepare you or give you unique insight for the internship?
Two classes did most of the heavy lifting. One was on intercultural communication (PAH 372), and it gave me language for something I’d been fumbling for a year. My team sits in Atlanta and Guadalajara, and I’d been reading quiet in meetings as agreement. That class made me realize I was misreading the room and running meetings in a way that only worked for half my people. The other was a business ethics class, which forced me to slow down and say why something felt wrong instead of just calling it wrong. That turns out to be useful when you’re the person who has to push back on a number.
If you worked on a big project, describe it.
The biggest one was our Q3 business review. That’s the formal session where each region presents performance and outlook to senior leadership, and it takes weeks of building and pressure testing before anything gets shown. This round was different because five people on my team were brand new and split across two countries, so it was the first time this version of the team had run one together. I had to design the process instead of just running it, deciding who owns what, how the Atlanta and Guadalajara work connects, and where the review points sit. We landed on schedule, briefed Investor Relations on first half results, and then ran a retrospective to catch what broke. The retrospective mattered as much as the delivery, because it turned a one-time scramble into something we can repeat.
What did you find most challenging about your internship?
The hardest part was treating something familiar as something to learn from. When the internship is your own job, the natural move is to keep your head down and get through the week. I had to build a habit of stopping to ask what a meeting actually taught me, and some weeks the honest answer was nothing. The weekly activity journal assignment forced the issue, because I had to put something real in it every Friday. What I took from that is you have to make yourself do it, because it never happens on its own. Once I started asking that question of myself, I started asking it of my team.
What advice do you have for other students as they search for or begin their internship?
Look at where you already are before you look anywhere else. A lot of students are working full time and assume that job does not count, when it may be the best place to do it if you’re willing to stretch the scope and set real goals. Talk to your supervisor early and be direct about what you want out of it, because most people are flattered to be asked. Then take the reflection pieces seriously, even when they feel like busywork. The journal entries I rushed taught me nothing, and the ones I actually sat with are the reason I got anything out of this at all.