Week 4 IDCCA Reflection

My fourth week as an intern with the IDCCA was unique in that it was the first week that I had the opportunity to directly collaborate with a fellow intern on a project. Previously, my tasks were on an individual level, for which I would check in with and receive feedback from my internship supervisor. This week, however, I was assigned to join a project already begun by another intern, under her direction.

Because she had been working on this project for two weeks, she had much more familiarity (and performance readiness) than I did initially. Over Zoom, she trained me on the particulars of the project, which involved cataloguing donations from employee unions. She did a good job training me and answering my questions in the moment, and made herself available over email should I have any follow-up questions. About an hour later, around 11:00 AM, I did email her with a question but, because she got sidetracked, she did not get back to me until the following morning. Fortunately, it was a minor question, and I followed my instincts and was ultimately correct — so in the grand scheme of things, it was not a big deal. Had my question been more major, it could have had a detrimental impact on our project. This was the only issue of ineffective leadership on her part throughout our three days collaborating; other than this, we communicated well and she was overall incredibly helpful. To address this issue going forward, I could have sent a follow-up email or perhaps reached out to her on another platform — two things I might have done had the question been more urgent.

Overall, my work with this other intern did give me an interesting insight into teamwork at the organization, especially because she works from the office while I am remote. After this mishap, we organically developed other systems of communication, such as typing on the Google Doc we were jointly working from where the other person could see if it was urgent. Though this could not completely replace the fact that we could not sit next to each other and simply talk, it was an innovative and effective substitute. Additionally, we had non-work conversations over the course of the project as well (I am currently vacationing in Nashville; she had visited two years ago so we talked about the city as well as her other job). This gave our conversations a more friendly feel as opposed to the more formal tone I use when talking to or emailing with my supervisors. I will begin another project with a different intern next week, and will be sure to apply these lessons from this project to that one as various problems and leadership scenarios present themselves.