One important lesson I learned during my internship was the importance of understanding workplace dynamics and how complex industry-level IT systems can be. For example, I observed how colleagues have different work styles and how some are more productive in the morning, while others work best later in the day. With their availability for a chat or support being limited, it taught me to adapt some of my communication and plan accordingly. Additionally, working with large-scale systems, such as codebases and databases, showed me the challenges of interpreting and navigating sophisticated systems. All of which, required a decent amount of patience and proper time-management to understand somewhat.
I learned that you need to adapt to each team that you are on. During my first project, my team consisted of myself and my Associate Director for our daily communication, I would typically ask in the beginning of each day what work I should do for that day. This worked for that team since she was typically busy and we would then decide what to do. When I switched to a larger team, I repeated the same process. I was told later on though that if I conduct some work regularly that I should not need to ask what to do and just start that work instead. While this seems obvious in retrospect, I had gotten used to being assigned work and did not want to do something I was not told to do. After that meeting, I started to change my work style and adapt to the needs of the team.
Something that I learned during my summer internship that I would not have been able to learn in the classroom or from a textbook would have to be how a Bank works on an internal operational level. When you interact with whoever you bank with externally as a customer you do not really understand or appreciate all that goes into what you as a customer have access to. For example, if your mobile deposit a check or transfer money between accounts online there are so many things that happen behind the scenes at a Banks central operations center that help process and facilitate that request. Before the internship I really had no real idea of how a bank operated besides what I knew of as a customer. Each team in operations had so many responsibilities that made the bank function on a day-to-day basis, and without them the bank would have had a hard time staying operational for its customers. Having the knowledge to be able to understand and not take for granted the work that takes place behind the scenes for things you use in your daily life is a new viewpoint and mindset I definitely learned over the summer.
One important lesson I learned during my internship was the importance of understanding workplace dynamics and how complex industry-level IT systems can be. For example, I observed how colleagues have different work styles and how some are more productive in the morning, while others work best later in the day. With their availability for a chat or support being limited, it taught me to adapt some of my communication and plan accordingly. Additionally, working with large-scale systems, such as codebases and databases, showed me the challenges of interpreting and navigating sophisticated systems. All of which, required a decent amount of patience and proper time-management to understand somewhat.
I learned that you need to adapt to each team that you are on. During my first project, my team consisted of myself and my Associate Director for our daily communication, I would typically ask in the beginning of each day what work I should do for that day. This worked for that team since she was typically busy and we would then decide what to do. When I switched to a larger team, I repeated the same process. I was told later on though that if I conduct some work regularly that I should not need to ask what to do and just start that work instead. While this seems obvious in retrospect, I had gotten used to being assigned work and did not want to do something I was not told to do. After that meeting, I started to change my work style and adapt to the needs of the team.
Something that I learned during my summer internship that I would not have been able to learn in the classroom or from a textbook would have to be how a Bank works on an internal operational level. When you interact with whoever you bank with externally as a customer you do not really understand or appreciate all that goes into what you as a customer have access to. For example, if your mobile deposit a check or transfer money between accounts online there are so many things that happen behind the scenes at a Banks central operations center that help process and facilitate that request. Before the internship I really had no real idea of how a bank operated besides what I knew of as a customer. Each team in operations had so many responsibilities that made the bank function on a day-to-day basis, and without them the bank would have had a hard time staying operational for its customers. Having the knowledge to be able to understand and not take for granted the work that takes place behind the scenes for things you use in your daily life is a new viewpoint and mindset I definitely learned over the summer.