Learning to enjoy work even when you cant see the effects of your contributions
As much as I have enjoyed my time working with the Congressman, one of my greatest challenges was the inability to see the first-hand effects of my work.
As a contributor both in my personal and professional life, I have seen how fulfilling is for me to see the impacts of the work I am doing. When I spend hours working on tasks or projects, I love to see the final product and the culmination of mine and many other’s hard works.
However, in the Congressman’s office, I had to adapt to a new form of contribution. Sometimes I spend hours researching a project or working on an assignment only to send it to my supervisor and never hear what it was for or if it were used. sometimes I spend hour researching news only to find that one article was chosen to be a part of our daily news reports. This has been a difficult transition for me because I find fulfillment through seeing a final product. I had to force myself to work even if I never saw the final product or understood why I was doing what I was doing. last week I saw that hard work pay off.
Each day the chief of staff prepares a news briefing that the congressman read every day. Although there are many interns, the chief of staff chose me to be responsible for putting those together and formatting them for the congressman to read each day. Although a small task I knew it was one she gave me because she trusted me to do the work in a timely and appropriate way. this was a really big moment of growth for me. It helped me find more fulfillment in the work I was doing because although I cant see the end results of my small daily tasks I can see the results of my hard work throughout the summer, by being trusted with important tasks and developing a name for myself as an intern who was reliable, hard-working and humble. Sometimes your contributions may seem small but I am grateful to have learned how to better look at the big picture.