Over the summer of my junior year, I interned at a local State Farm Office. Working 9 am-5 pm Monday through Friday I was trained on soft skills as well as some program management skills. I was in charge of providing timely financial updates, updating customers about their claims, and informing people about discounts and changes to premiums.

Coming into this workplace I felt confident in my abilities and my understanding of concepts. What I realized is how important it is to be able to demonstrate that to others even when you can get the work done right. Working in insurance is a unique environment where you usually aren’t dealing with happy people since no one likes paying for insurance or the trouble of using it, yet it’s very necessary. It is very typical to deal with ageist stubborn angry old people and if you can’t display maturity, knowledge, and confidence, then they will assume you know nothing because they don’t know you yet and you are a kid in the eyes of 80-year-olds.

The interactions I’ve had with customers, whether it was a positive interaction or an angry people who didn’t pay their bill, I was able to take something away. One of my main takeaways is the needed mindset. Sometimes some people just need a familiar face or voice to talk to because they have built trust. You can’t take customer interactions personally, it doesn’t mean you did something wrong, in my case I told them the same thing as the senior employee.

I probably answered the phone each day between 15-40 times, and because of this, I was able to build confidence with customers without being face-to-face. I was able to calm people down, help people understand things that might be foreign to them, and operate in a fast-paced manner.

I was given some opportunity to identify and develop business leads. For me this was very interesting because it allowed me to do more creative work. Using data I was able to make decisions to develop leads then pass those leads to liciensed insurance agents. This was one of my favorite projects, I defenitly will decide to work in a profession where I can use data to make decisions.

My end professional goal is far from insurance. In fact I probably will never work with insurance again. The people aren’t the best, kind of a boring, stable environment and we typically had more bad news then good. With that being said, working at State Farm brought a lot of value for professional development. I was able to futher development professionally. This includes coming to work everyday dressed in a professional manor, upholding myself in a professional manor regardless the situation. I also got an overview of many financial product and how State Farm works with them. With all of this experience I am able to come out as a more polished business man with a better understanding of insurance, financial servers, project management and customer support.