Undergraduate Blog / Career Development

Know What You Want to Accomplish

Kowning what you would like to accomplish from your internship is really important for building up your professional resume and gaining technical knowledge in your filed of interest. As a result, setting goals is always the first thing that interns should do before the start of their internships. For me, I decided to work on two areas on my summer internship before I started working.

I decided to work on improving my technical skills and building my interpersonal communication skills.

I am working at a start-up company which requires me to take up multiple responsibilities on different fields. That gives me a unique opportunity to learn technical skills on different dimensions. In this summer, I am planning to gaining working knowledge of spreadsheet-based data formulas, calculations, and modeling techniques, in order to get used to working with mass set of data when I am in charge of financial projection roles in the company. Creating and giving presentations is also an important task that I have this summer, as I plan to learn how to build more delicate presentations from storyboarding to design, copywriting, and rehearsing. These would be essential communication skills that are pivotal to professional work experiences. Lastly, from the IT class that I took last semester, I realized the importance of marketing for a start-up company. So I am planning to learn how to conduct online market research using Google’s advanced search capabilities as well as media-specific search tools and various financial, business, and open data sources from the databases.

Even though I am working in a firm that only has five employees at the moment, it is still tremendously important for me to learn and build interpersonal communication skills. This summer, I am wishing to hone my ability to connect with people such as colleagues and clients to build trust. The start-up company I am working for is ultimately a people’s business. Therefore, personal connections, trust, and first impressions are very important drives of deal making and success in the field the company is in. I am also planning to learn how to communicate with entrepreneurs, clients, and other participants of the start-up ecosystems. My goal is to be able to connect and communicate very clearly to them without any corporate jargon, and to be able to quickly understand topics and ideas that are a little bit technical.