Making Contributions Count

Working at such a small company allows for my to contribute in a variety of different areas and departments in order to contribute to the startup’s success. For instance, one day I shadowed my CEO at a municipal meeting where I simply observed and took notes in order to transcribe and document what happened at the meeting. While it is important work, I feel as though this kind of work is more lower level and fairly standard for an intern. The following week, however, there was an issue with company emails being sent to spam for users with a certain kind of email address. These people were missing important new information and deals within the app, and it was very important that we fix the problem as soon as possible so that there were no discrepancies in which customers receive different information. One of my supervisors asked me to get to the bottom of this, and what I thought would originally take me an afternoon to figure out ended up eating into all of my time for the rest of the week. I had to make numerous phone calls and quickly learn some of the basic ins and outs of internet blacklisting and data security. This task took me in a direction that I did not expect my internship to go in, but I was able to get to the source of the problem and resolve the issue. 

I also feel as though some of my observations while working here have made a positive impact on the ultimate mission of the organization. In my first few weeks working here, a number of other employees were working on pitching a radio ad for the app. I came to realize that this idea could be taken a step further in the form of a podcast ad, since I sometimes listen to podcasts during my commute (knowing that a number of other commuters do the same thing). This led to an interesting conversation between the more general and widespread audiences that podcasts garner versus the more targeted audiences of local radio stations. Sharing this perspective with my coworkers helped bring the idea to more people and would ultimately help in the mission of getting the app more exposure and use. I am overall proud of the contributions that I have made at my internship so far this summer, and I look forward to helping more in the final weeks of my internship as they quickly approach.