We are currently on week three of the Fall semester of 2017. My last year as an undergrad here at Canisius and I decided that this semester an internship would be right for me. I’m not going to lie, I was really nervous to begin working at The Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus’ Innovation Center. Just the title itself sounds intimidating! However, I had made the commitment and so it was only forward from there. Now we’re here, three weeks in and I’ve gone to my internship three times so far. Each time I’ve been nervous and anxious to get it over with. You know, the sort of feeling you get when you’re about to do something exciting but nerve-wracking and you sort of just want it to be over, not because it’s a bad time, but more because you want to feel comfortable and relaxed again. Every morning that I am going to the internship, I’m always thinking about when I’ll be able to walk out of the building at 2pm and let out a sigh of relief for having completed another day.
Yet, every day, once I get to the innovation center. I always forget about wanting to leave in order to feel that moment of relief. Instead, I get excited about the adrenaline that runs through a meeting between my supervisor and her bosses. I feel comfortable sitting in on a meeting with my supervisor and her bosses as we discuss their communication and marketing set up and how we can improve it. I feel so comfortable that I find myself commenting, making suggestions and engaging completely with the conversations and brainstorming moments being had. In those moments I actually feel like I’m their equal, instead of just an intern, and I love that. My supervisor, Sarah, does a good job at making me feel comfortable as well. She’s a good conversationalist, but she also gives me tasks and allows me to sort things out on my own, my own way. For example, on Monday my task for the day was to take the information given from the meeting with Yelp and categorize it into an Excel spreadsheet. However, there was a plethora of restaurants within the link that were in range of our building (as that is the project that I have been heavily involved with working on: creating a food map of local places around the area) and it was my discretion which ones would go best on the map. I went out of my way to fulfill the subject fields asked of me, and then some, through the Excel and I even did some outside research on other locations that weren’t on the list already provided. Then at 1pm that day, we had a 2nd follow up meeting with a graphic designer that I got to sit in on and contribute to the process of creation for the food map to go from digital to an actual physical graphic map of the area. That entire meeting was based on my excel spreadsheet and the locations, and information that I organized and provided. That was a really cool feeling because in those few hours only, I got to experience the beginning part of creation within a workforce, and that was something I’d never experienced before.
I’m very excited to continue my internship. Although I still get that uncomfortable feeling of being scared to engage in the day’s work, once I’m there my being loves the work, adrenaline, and responsibility of working in a fast paced environment and being able to share, grow and expand my perspective of the business world and what it means to be a part of a good team.
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