Week 5: Personal Contributions on my Project
I have been on my project for just about two weeks now. While I am understandably not given the most responsibility on the team, I still feel as if I am making valuable contributions to our project.
For the past two weeks, I have been mostly doing research and analyzing our client’s customer’s buying behavior. I’ve looked through past performance documents and conducted primary research. The issue is however, past performance is not necessarily indicative of future performance, and our client’s customer is the Navy— so primary research is a bit of a challenge. Not only is it difficult to find the phone numbers of Navy service members in the relevant offices, but once you get someone on the phone they are very cautious about what they say (understandably so, they’re trying not to disclose classified information). I’ve been calling for a couple days now and have yet to yield any relevant intel for the project.
Although, I have been able to find useful information and analysis on our client’s customer’s buying behavior through secondary research. In this regard, I feel as if I have contributed a good amount. The research consisted of chiefly reading through previous Naval contracts, for similar products to our client’s, to try and distill any preferences, priorities, or themes woven throughout the contracts they have signed in the past.
I get staffed to my second project next week, so I’ll be working two at a time. The up and down of two projects at a time is that I’ll have more opportunities to contribute and display value, but I’ll also probably be in the office much much later each day 😅
I can only imagine how difficult primary research may be under these circumstances. I’m glad your secondary research has proved to be more accessible and that you feel as though you’ve been able to make contributions with this work. As you continue and even after you complete your internship, I encourage you to identify concrete examples of the tasks you complete, responsibilities you assume, etc. as they will serve you well when you begin to interview for full-time work. Additionally, if any opportunities present themselves where you can offer insights to relevant individuals at your site based on your leadership studies, I encourage you to share those. You can always blame it on me/Jepson – “I have to reflect on my experience at this internship and how it relates to my leadership studies and I realized…” If this is feasible, you may also be able to contribute to team dynamics, work flow, communication, etc.