Well, the end of my second internship at TCEDC has arrived. I have had a great experience here at TCEDC, through both internships. I really feel that I accomplished my goals with this internship. One weakness I have is I am not the most comfortable on the phone, so one of my goals was to be the one to answer the phone calls and provide information, take messages, and improve my confidence in that situation. Needless to say, working here has definitely improved my phone communication skills. Beyond improving my communication skills I got to accomplish another goal of mine which was to work in an office setting and acquire the skills necessary to do so. I enjoyed the office setting (although the novelty did wear off pretty quickly) and I now feel comfortable working in an office. I’ve improved my clerical skills by creating documents for the food center and TCEDC in general. Overall my goal of acquiring “office skills” has been accomplished. I even got to use my IT skills by keeping the computers working well and performing regular maintenance on them (I think they’re going to miss having me around given all the tech work I’ve done for them). I still plan to pursue a career in IT, but as I’ve said I think that working in an office was a valuable thing. Perhaps one day I’ll be the “IT guy” in an office setting, rather than working on a help desk or doing freelance IT work. I’ve also begun considering starting my own IT business. These internships at TCEDC have definitely improved my resume in addition to all I got out of them. It felt good to be working somewhere that helps so many people, and getting to help them myself. Every single day I met all kinds of new people; from aspiring food entrepreneurs to the children participating in their school’s cooking program out of the food center. I’ve also been able to add more people to my professional network.
The main project I had during my internship (I started at the end of my first internship and finished at the end of my second) was organizing and filing ALL of the documents in TCEDC that were previously just sitting disorganized on tables and desks. I have included some pictures at the end of this post of some of the progress I made. Overall I am happy to have worked at TCEDC this summer, and very happy to have become a member of the Ogallala Commons intern “family”.
