Reflection 4: Solving Problems/Improving Leadership

Although I have mostly enjoyed my internship at O’Neill and Associates, I have noticed some areas where the organization could improve. The majority of the issues I have observed or experienced result from working in a remote environment, so I think that if I were working in person my internship experience would be different and these issues would be easier to navigate. The most significant of these issues is the division between different teams in the company. Everyone seems to have friendly relationships with each other, but most people do not seem to do a lot of work outside of their teams. We have one all-staff meeting a week, but aside from that I work almost entirely with my team of six people, and within this group, I mostly work with Jen, a senior director who is my direct mentor, and Ben and Madison, two recent graduates. Jen and I have a good relationship and she makes an effort to check in with me at least once a day. However,  she is extremely busy and does not always have time to answer questions outside of our scheduled check-ins, so I sometimes have to wait for her to finish her other meetings if I hit a roadblock while completing an assignment. If I were working in person, it would be easier to approach someone else and ask for clarification. 

Another aspect of my internship experience that I feel could be improved is the lack of opportunities for collaboration with the other interns. We have one weekly meeting that is ran by the internship coordinator, but since I am the only intern on my team, I have very little interaction with the other interns. This would obviously not be the case if we were all working in person. The lack of interaction with the other interns has sometimes made my work more difficult than it otherwise would be. For example, one of my assignments last week was to start compiling a spreadsheet of all the available government funding opportunities that a client’s business could be eligible for, which was an extremely time-consuming task. I found out later that Evan, another intern, had also been given this same assignment by one of his mentors. I think that if we had had more regular interaction within the intern group, Evan and I would have realized earlier that we could work together, which would have helped us get the assignment done faster.