Zebra Technologies Internship

1. Please provide a brief description of your STEP Signature Project.

My STEP Project was an internship with Zebra Technologies as a Tech Ops Intern working on improving Zebra’s distribution center’s Lean Six Sigma audits. This project entailed creating an application for data entry, creating a data analytics dashboard, as well as creating automations to streamline the process.

2. What about your understanding of yourself, your assumptions, or your view of the world changed/transformed while completing your STEP Signature Project?

One major takeaway from my internship that I took away was a greater appreciation for working with international colleagues. I learned a lot about the way different cultures effect their business practices. Additionally, I learned a lot about the drive and self-discipline needed to work on a large project over a period of time. Skills like time management proved to be crucial over the course of my internship. Lastly, I was able to learn a lot about working in a professional setting. Just picking up some nuances and just the way I am supposed to conduct myself in the setting.

3.  What events, interactions, relationships, or activities during your STEP Signature Project led to the change/transformation that you discussed in #2, and how did those affect you?

I had the opportunity to work with an international team. The distribution centers that I was working with were based in Singapore,  the Netherlands, and Fort Worth, TX. Because of this I was constantly in contact with international engineers as I worked to complete my project. Working with them forced me to change the way I conducted meetings and discussed topics. I learned how different cultures affected the way they worked in meetings. Whereas, in the US employees are more inclined to ask questions and willing to interrupt, I learned in other cultures questions are more reserved and interrupting is never accepted. This required me to take more formal time for questions to accommodate the rest of the teams cultures. It is small things like this that illustrated the need to be aware of the diversity of the team and how to harness it.

Additionally, working on a large project that lasted the course of three months did require a good amount of effort to make sure I was remaining on track and not falling behind. This involved on creating checkpoints for myself and building an action tracker to monitor and identify project issues. This also allowed me to prevent having to catch-up at any point and clearly communicate the progress that had been made with my manager. Moving forward I will have gained time management experience and experience working relatively independently on a large project.

Lastly, I was able to benefit from being emerged in a corporate environment. Whether just learning the proper etiquette for scheduling meetings or how to work with HR and deal with corporate hierarchies, I gained many small insights from my experience at Zebra. Additionally, I was fortunate enough to have numerous mentors who offered great career advice that helped me manage the onboarding process but also how to plan for my future.

4. Why is this change/transformation significant or valuable for your life?

All of these skills that I have gained over my few months at zebra have been invaluable. For one, the ability to harness diversity and learning about the cultural differences between employees and how to use them to find the best solution is something that will easily be applicable in future careers, but also in academia. Working on group projects, I will now have a more keen sense on how to bring out ideas from more introverted group members and make everyone feel included in the discussion. Additionally, gaining greater time management skills will be incredibly helpful as I work on bigger projects and receive less oversight. Being able to work independently and not needing to constantly consult my manager was very important skill that I will take moving forward as it allows me to be more effective. Lastly, I think that all of the “soft” knowledge that I have gained from mentors, intern programming and through immersion in the corporate environment will help me to be more effective when entering my career.