With a little help from my … friends?

When one is given a task yet the route in which to get there is unknown it is normal to ask questions, directions if you will. However, when factoring in the busy atmosphere and constant phone calls the capability to insert your question in the set amount of time before that phone rings again on a bright Monday morning, adds some confusion. This week I learned the severity of asking questions. This may sound mundane and incredibly obvious however the courage it takes to ask what seems to be a silly question really is challenging, partly because you are asking a question knowing that those who you are asking have been working on such topics for years upon end thus the answer would never be of issue. I found this incredibly interesting because I do not find myself to be an increasingly shy person. I like to think I am relatively outgoing and that in a situation of this nature I can put myself out there in order to finish the task quickly and efficiently. My rational mind tells me that the question is not unintelligible because I am an intern learning the ropes so there is no viable way that I would know how to do all tasks immediately – especially when creating such an extensive spreadsheet of all of their past rates and surveyors. But my irrational mind which causes a road blockage is that they have more important tasks to pursue and during such a high tense time of a merge, the problems have to be prioritized – obviously this is not the case.

Now this problem worked in two ways for me. Initially, during the beginning of the week, I found that my nerves led me to fix the problems on my own. This led to researching specificities rather than asking small questions because the answer could be found elsewhere. These questions stemmed from what is an AHTS (which I now know stands for Anchor Handling Tug Supply Vessel), to more complex ones regarding the ins and outs of the way in which their software worked. Although this mindset didn’t help when I was faced with larger problems, like that of intricate questions referencing specific vessels, it prevented me from immediately standing forward and over-thinking that I was a nuisance.

This may sound like possibly an insecurity, but I think that it made me directly think of leader-follower relations. For this relationship to grow it is imperative that the follower feel like he or she can rely on their leader implicitly. Of course such discourse would not immediately be enacted within the first week – additionally, this relationship can be affected by the time in which this relationship attempts to grow. The roots of my strength in this internship are unfortunately growing during a rather tumultuous time which in turn means that the workload is high and the tensions are positively correlated with such. This, even after two weeks, has enabled me to grow as a person based upon the underlying knowledge of not only self-worth but that you cannot do everything by yourself.