- My STEP Project was an internship with Sarnova, a company located in Dublin, OH. For my internship, I worked as a part of the IT Support team for Sarnova, which is a company that supplies necessary medical equipment to private and public companies. My main responsibilities were to close tickets by troubleshooting computer hardware and software issues. This included repairing and installing programs, troubleshooting network connections, and fixing hardware issues such as the internal computer speaker.
- Throughout my internship, the biggest personal growth I accomplished was that I became more comfortable asking for help when needed. I learned that it was necessary to ask others for help, especially when I didn’t know how to do things, and I learned that most of the time people are willing to give a hand and teach you how to do new things. It changed my understanding of the business world because the senior leadership team was always very welcoming to me, and invited me to reach out if I ever had questions or needed anything. This experience perfected my skills communicating with others and recognizing when to ask for help. I overcame some of my personal anxieties about being rejected because I realized that most of the time, people like to help out if they can. This change was crucial to my professional growth because it prepared me to be confident in interviews and to feel comfortable asking for what I need.
- The relationships I had with my team were monumental in helping the transformation that I described in #2. The IT Support Team was a small, close knit team, so I was fortunate to have a good relationship with all of the other team members. I had a good relationship with the other intern, which we formed because of an important project that we worked on together at the beginning of our internship. Our internship started about the same time that the pandemic and quarantine began, which caused our company to transition to working from home. The first project that we worked on was setting up laptops for all of the other employees so that they were able to efficiently work from home. We worked long hours together and were able to complete the project a month earlier than the anticipated end date. This helped us form a close bond from the get go, and it was comforting to feel like there was someone else that I could ask for help. With that, the senior support analysts on the team were helpful when I had to close tickets. Our team worked primarily from a ticket queue, which received requests ranging from a program install to fixing an application that wouldn’t open. The senior staff on the team was helpful in answering any questions I had and even accommodated for working remotely by screen-sharing to show me how to troubleshoot an issue. I’m grateful for all of the things they taught me over the 10 months of my internship because it allowed me to have a much better understanding of technology. They also helped me with interpersonal communication by proofreading emails, newsletter articles, and instructional documents to make sure that they made sense to others.
- This personal development matters because it helped me gain confidence in myself and my abilities. At the beginning of the internship, I was not comfortable solving many of the technical issues because I was afraid that I would do something wrong. By the end of my internship, I felt confident in the skills that I had learned, and felt proud of how much I had learned over a short period of time. This development matters in both my professional and personal life, because it also helped me realize that I needed to give myself credit for all of the things I accomplished. Working from home during the pandemic hindered my confidence in myself because it felt like I was doing mostly independent work. I didn’t feel that I was accomplishing enough because I was working alone and didn’t have others around me to verbally acknowledge what I was doing. Through a heart to heart conversation with my supervisor, he recognized the work I had accomplished during my internship and praised me for how well I was doing and for all of the things I learned. He also said that if I was doing anything wrong, they would ask me about it, which made me feel better at the time. It put things in perspective for me because I realized that I didn’t have to feel overwhelmed with work, when there wasn’t anything I was doing wrong. This advice was one of the most valuable things I learned at my internship because it is also applicable to situations in my personal life. It put situations in my personal relationships and friendships in perspective, to appreciate the things that were going well rather than worrying that I wasn’t enough for other people.