Wrap Up: Biggest takeaways

As I wrap up my internship, there were 2 big projects I took ownership of that were very rewarding experiences for me. A big part of my internship was to help with the management of an internal community platform run by the Senior Manager of Portfolio Engagement who I reported to directly. The purpose of this platform is to engage all of the companies we invest in and create a community among them. It has features including a discussion forum, a resource library to check out all of Insight’s content, networking opportunities, etc. After being introduced to the platform and learning more about it, I offered insights and recommendations for how we can better the website to make it more visually appealing, easy to navigate, and organized to ensure a great user experience. Coming in with fresh eyes and a new perspective, I observed how the resource library was very disorganized and hard to look out/not inviting to read. The articles were not clearly organized into their specific categories and because there were no images and every article looked the same, it did not grab your attention. I proposed creating a new landing page for the resource library that highlights top content and has buttons directing you to another landing page of top content from each category. This proposal addressed the navigational issues the platform was facing. Within the top content pages I created from scratch, I included illustrations that represent the article so that the articles grabbed your eye better and were inviting to click on. This strategy helped address the visually unappealing problem the platform was facing. All in all, I transformed the resource library feature to be much more easy to navigate and visually appealing to gain more traction on the articles. It was very rewarding to take ownership of this project and see my ideas be executed all by myself and I am interested to see if the engagement goes up after these changes were put into place. 

A big challenge I faced especially towards the beginning of my internship was being afraid to share my ideas if I contradicted something and being afraid to ask questions. I think a big factor that contributed to this was the nature of working remotely because I was afraid my thoughts delivered via teams could be received wrong whereas in person it is much easier to have in depth conversations and share ideas as we think. As I got more comfortable as time progressed and I met some of my teammates in person, I became a lot more comfortable sharing my ideas and expressing my thoughts if I disagreed. For example, I started to express my thoughts and what I think we should do and why. Once I started doing this, my work started to be a lot more productive and I was able to make significant changes like making changes to the community platform. This experience has taught me not to be afraid to speak up and share my thoughts because better idea generation comes from disagreement. When I discussed this with my supervisor she agreed and expressed how as a leader it is more beneficial to have someone that challenges ideas rather than just going with the flow and agreeing to everything. This insight about the leader/follower dynamic played a big role in team efforts and I could clearly see the changes in production from being more shy to being more confident in my ideas. I look forward to using this as a learning experience and speaking up in future roles.