STEP Reflection – Study Abroad

Fisher’s Global Internship

Summer 2018

My STEP project was an internship in London through Fisher’s Global Internship Program. I worked for a company called Cox Automotive UK in their data solutions department. I learned how to create insightful visualizations in Tableau and manipulate and clean up data using SQL.

In general, I’m a fairly introverted person. I like to make connections with people, but I’m not really one to put myself out there for those opportunities. Therefore, some of my main goals for this program were as follows. One, learn as much as I can and contribute positively to my company – after all this was an internship not just hanging out with fellow students in another country. Two, meet new people and try new things. I think it’s probably easier to invent a new self with people you don’t know in a place you’re not from. I wanted to get out of my comfort zone and experience new things while I was on this program. I only two other people on my same program to London (even though there were over 60 of us going). My plan was to leverage my friendship with them and the fact that they both are super outgoing to make new friends and accomplish my goals for the summer.

Because I knew two people on my program, roomed with one of them, and all the students on the trip were sort of going through the same thing, I felt it was easier to kind of put myself out there and connect with strangers which I normally find pretty difficult to do. The program itself also put on a couple of events to facilitate the students getting to know each other. I became friends with a lot of the people on the program and found people travel with me, challenge me, and make really great memories with that I couldn’t have made without this program. I learned a lot about myself on this program because I was originally thinking that I would need the two people that I knew beforehand to really help me make friends and feel more comfortable, and they definitely did make me feel more comfortable especially the first week, but I also learned that I can be outgoing and really adapt to certain situations when I need to. As I said earlier I think it probably helps to reinvent yourself when you’re in a completely new place, but I was genuinely surprised that I was able to step out of my comfort zone as much as I did (by myself) during this program. I think it really helped that I liked a lot of the people on my trip and that I loved my job.

One of the things that really surprised me about the program is how much I loved working. I thought it would be a great way to get experience and learn about business culture in a different country but I didn’t really expect to like my job as much as I did because I was so nervous about it before actually leaving for London. I was nervous because my job was in data solutions, and while I am a business analytics minor I am one, not very good with technology and two, have very little experience working with data. However, I had plenty of time to work with and learn how to use the tools (Tableau and SQL) in order to accomplish tasks I was given. Also, my coworkers were absolutely amazing and were so knowledgeable and willing to help; it was really cool learning from them. My coworkers were also all pretty young so another fun thing that happened that I wasn’t expecting was that I actually became friends with my coworkers.

I think my trip abroad and my internship experience have given me more confidence in myself and my abilities. I have a really difficult course load for the rest of my undergraduate life and I feel more capable of doing well because of the knowledge and experiences I gained while abroad. A lot of my classes this semester are very application and project based, so I think I’ll be able to understand more about what is being asked and able to better deliver those things because of my experiences. This is also the year I finish up most of my business analytics classes and I actually have a little bit of comprehension behind this now because of my internship. Technically during my internship I was working with the BI guys (Business Intelligence) which mainly consisted of creating visualizations for the business’ internal clients. However, the coworker I was closest to was in the middle of transitioning from BI to data science. Data science interests me a lot because it has more of stat component involved so we talked about that a lot and he suggested articles for me to read, so now I feel like I’m not coming in totally blind to what the more statistical side of business analytics is all about, which again really helps with my confidence which in the past is something that I haven’t always had.

I think I also learned that in general people want to help. When I don’t understand something right away I’ve always kind of felt stupid and like a burden because if I don’t understand it I have to ask questions and then I take time away from that person to do other things they might want to do more. At the start of my internship my company was trying to launch a new product called AIMS and it was new way to collect the data that they needed for their visualizations and things of the like. They were supposed to launch it the week that I started work but it wasn’t quite ready yet because it was still in the testing phase and the people pushing to just implement it already didn’t quite understand what they were asking for but the deadline of this launch had already been pushed back at least one year, so they really wanted it ready. So, everyone in my department was working to get it launched and also had other things they still had to do for the business on their plates, so I felt bad interrupting them to tell them I didn’t have work, or didn’t understand something that was probably pretty basic to them or really just interrupting them for something that I might need which I thought wouldn’t be a priority. However, I quickly learned that they were always willing to help out even thought they were busy with time sensitive things. I was still conscientious of their time and didn’t interrupt them with every little thing I had questions on and did a lot of researching on my own. But, I did keep a list of questions that when one of my coworkers had time I could ask them. And generally, those conversations lasted longer than I thought they would because my coworkers really wanted to make sure that I had a thorough understanding of what was being asked and how to continue forward which I really appreciated. I think that was also a really good lesson for me to learn.

I had been to London twice before my program there and loved it so I wanted to go back because one, I loved it and two, I felt comfortable there, and the biggest reason I wanted to go back (for an extended period of time) was because I wanted to see if I could live there. My conclusion: I could, and I desperately want to. My biggest takeaway from this experience aside from how much I grew as a person is learning how much I love London and how well of a fit it is for me. I loved being in such a culturally diverse place. In my office alone, there were four people from England (obviously), two from Hungary, two from the states, one from Columbia, one from Spain, one from Portugal, one from New Zealand, one from Russia, and one from Latvia. Which was such a cool experience because one of my biggest passions is linguistics and language, so it was amazing to hear and learn about all the different languages. London is also a business hub which is good for a business major. There’s a big movement for finding your cultural fit with a company. That’s a big thing companies are looking for now because it’s proven that having a good cultural fit increases a worker’s happiness and productivity, so I think it’s just as important to find that fit in the place that you live. It probably doesn’t hurt that every single time that I’ve been to London I have had amazing weather (no humidity, unlike Ohio).

I feel incredibly lucky to have had this experience and found a place, culture, and people that I love so much. This experience has really made me push myself because I have found something that I really want that is not the easiest thing to do (start a life in London after I graduate college), so as of August 12, I have been researching and reaching out to people to figure out how I can make this dream a reality.