Workplace Environment Matters

Something that one of the now-graduated seniors said when they came to talk to our class about their internships was that culture and environment was one of the most important and defining aspects of their internship. After the first couple of weeks working for THO, I can certainly see where they were coming from, and that they were completely right. I think that organizational culture has been my favorite part of my internship so far, which is saying something because I am loving the work I am doing!

I work in an office building and my organization has a group of smaller offices on one floor, mixed among other organizations like other nonprofits and law offices. Right now, I share an office with another intern, a Global Studies major at Yale, Eda. She and I have a ton in common and get along really well which is important considering how close of quarters we are in for ten or more hours a day. We work back and forth, helping each other on small parts of projects or proofreading each other’s work. In the larger office, communication is informal. For example, if I do not want to walk down the hall to talk to anyone I will text or email them whatever I need, and they will do the same to me. Everyone at the office was overly welcoming and excited to have all of us interns for the summer, so I felt at home right away. Since everyone in the office on a regular basis is under 30, the way they tend to operate is as a group of friends, but as a highly motivated to achieve a goal group of friends. Which for some people I could see this being a problem because it wouldn’t motivate them to get work done, but for me it is inspiring and makes me want to do more and help as much as I can.

Some of the values of my organization are networking, working hard, and to not spend all of our time actually in the office, just to name a few. The most important thing to my supervisors that I am able to network and develop myself professionally during my time here because they genuinely want this summer to be a good experience for me and to help me accomplish my goals. Part of that is that they want to be able to have me as a contact later on down the road if I end up in D.C. full time, but a lot of it is that since the team is all young they remember how difficult and scary things were when they were in my shoes. At THO I certainly feel that I can find solid mentors and friends here that will be valuable in the future. For example, today is my birthday. I usually arrive before everyone in the office and this morning they all excitedly came running into my office to tell me “happy birthday”! It was nice to feel like they were as excited about something about me as they were about the cool projects we are working on.  

The way that my office functions and is led is definitely influenced by the fact that this is a small think tank that is coming up on its 5th birthday. Our executive director is involved in everything in at least some capacity. We all work as a team but anything we have done is cleared through him first. Additionally, the events going on in Turkey right now are controversial and require difficult conversations, but being bipartisan forces us to be extremely careful with the wording we choose and how we present different topics. There are several groups here that are funded by the Turkish government and they do not like us (to put it lightly), so we also have to be attentive to logistical security risks when we are putting on events to prevent people from coming in and causing a scene.

The only weakness I see in the way that my organization is run is that sometimes the communication is muddled. I feel that we all get so focused on our own projects that we may not be aware of what everyone else is doing, which can lead to confusion or wasted time catching others up later on. I think that one way to improve this is to have a sort of team google drive, document, or bulletin where we can post short progress reports and summaries of the work we are currently working on. I am going to talk to my supervisor about this at our weekly check-in on Monday to see if we can brainstorm any more solutions to having better channels of communication.