The purpose of this essay is to highlight my experiences at Brooklyn Community Services to shed light upon key learning experiences that can contribute to a holistic educational experience. In this essay I will first describe my goals and expectations. Next, I will go into detail about my daily routine and how these exercises contributed toward the overall experience. I will then explore the overall lessons learned from my time spent at the firm. Typically, internships are professional experiences that students participate in to gain professional skills and experiences.
In this particular experience at Accounting Firm X I did in fact gain substantial professional skill while participating in new and challenging experiences. Internships allow in- class material to come to life in a practical manner. My internship did do this but not in a way that I had planned because it was in a non profit organization. My goals for this experience were simple. My first and most important goal was to learn. More specifically I wanted to get a more general view about my chosen profession. I wanted to be exposed to the standard practices that an Finance major would be subjected to.
But however, the experiences of working as an intern at BCS was enough to mould me as I advance into my career. It is a reflection showing the experiences during the period. This report is divided into three parts and begins with a self-reflection, career outlook and the overview of the bank as seen from the inside.
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Working at BCS enabled me to understand some aspects of being successful in customer service and even though this does not necessarily fit into Finance, what I have come to learn is that communication is usually an essential aspect to success. It is also important for an individual to have the ability of multitasking during the working hours. This will make him/her flexible in the workplace. On the other hand, I also realized that it is important maintain punctuality in order to be successful. Another key to success entails that an individual has to have a professional attitude in order to fit in the competitive market. At the same time, one should have the ability to network with people in the chosen professional field.
It is important for people to involve themselves in internship programs in order to be in a position of understanding the important aspect of the work. In the study of business management, individuals are usually encouraged to associate with other people so that they would be in a position of gaining experience in the field. This was a partial program, which I used as a bridge to build the gap between the practical and theoretical knowledge. During this time, I was privileged to undergo three fundamental stages in my experience. The stages include orientation into the finance sector, having more knowledge in another field ( financial operations in a non profit organization), and meeting different types of people per day.
During this time, I had to establish my objectives as I worked. The first objective was to attain the knowledge on the manner in which BCS works and carries out its practices. The other objective is to have adverse knowledge in financial operations of the organization. In order to have an accurate representation of the nature of the work I was given, I embarked on different methodologies and strategies.
The primary methodology included direct conversation and confrontation between me and the various department representatives and the clients. This was through face-to-face conversation,. Moreover, I had the opportunity of observing the heads of different departments reacting to issues which affected their departments directly. The secondary sources of knowing more about the issues taking place in the bank were facilitated with the use of going to the website to read about issues associated with the organization.
I have been taking classes towards earning my bachelors in Financial Economics for two years now. As it turns out the classes I have been taking so far that I didn’t think would be of any help have impacted my career in a big way. This meant that I was familiar with how day to day operations went on. I thought that I had a pretty good handle on how we did what we do. It turns out that that wasn’t completely true. This internship opened some doors that I didn’t even realized existed.
The main goal of my internship was to complete and control a project management plan for a new project that we received. Initially I was nervous about completing this task. I hadn’t had much experience with project management besides the classes I have taken. Once I started digging into the process I realized that I not only could handle the tasks, but I could also add to these tasks to make them better. A lot of the information that I was gathering and defining was covered in the classes I had taken.
My confidence grew rather quickly when I realized that I could contribute to these processes and better our projects. After I created the project management plan I held a meeting to go over what I created with the project team. After everyone reviewed the document I received a great deal of positive feedback. Everyone on the team, liked the completeness of the document, and the direction the document would take the project.
My internship also included other tasks. I took on more responsibility with the design of substations. This meant I had to communicate ideas and issues with clients via phone calls and email. I also had to work across offices to ensure that designs were collaborative and complete. I really enjoyed this aspect of the internship.Other duties included working on standardizing processes within our designs. This task isn’t something that can be completed in six short weeks.
But I started the process by creating learning modules to help new employees. I also worked on creating standard conduit and grounding details that can be used on almost every project we work on. I did this by working with senior engineers and reviewing old projects to see what worked well and what needed improvement. Using these updated details saves on time and in turn budget, and ensures a quality product every time.
There is one thing that I do feel that I could have done differently in my internship. And that is being involved earlier on in the project I created the project management plan for. I would like to see the very beginning phases of a project. These tasks include proposals, bidding, and budgeting. I would like to know how we propose on jobs and how we find these opportunities. I would also like to see how we budget time and money for these jobs. Usually by the time I work on the project everything is in place. I do my work and try to stay within the time and budget that I am allotted.
Overall I think the internship was a great experience that opened my eyes to some situations and processes that I was unaware of. I feel like the classes that I took did a great job in preparing me to step into a finance/management position and excel in it. I am completely confident that my technical abilities matched with my new knowledge with make me a shoe in for this role.
