During my internship with First Nations Development Institute I was able to learn a lot more in my time here than I had in any other job. When I started out I was mainly helping out with organization of grants and filing. I was eased into planning the LEAD conference for this year so for me it was a very exciting time for me to start since I was able to come in close to the beginnings of the planning. As I familiarized myself more with LEAD and the programs that it takes to plan such large events, I was given more work which was great for keeping myself busy and practicing what I had been taught through the use of REGOnline and Excel on Microsoft Word. It was great to be able to learn these skills since now there are so many careers that require basic knowledge of technology and word documents.
Some other things I was able to do were to do research on people, awards, and professionals for us to contact about scholarships, awards, and consulting. This was great for me to be able to distinguish what information on the internet can be useful and how I can use the internet to dig for something extremely specific that I needed to find. I was also able to learn how to contact people on the phone better. Since now most of what is done to contact someone is either through texting or emailing, it was actually useful for me to be able to pick up the phone and talk to people directly. Some challenges I had came with contacting people over the phone since I had very little practice with it before starting here aside from a short job where we had scripts to follow. One of the ways that I overcame this was to have a script written up before a call until I felt more comfortable with speaking.
So far I feel that I have had a decent amount of success because I have been able to get many things done for others and myself. My interaction with my supervisor was great, she kept me busy and I was always able to go to her with any questions without a fear of being yelled at so that was amazing to me. With Ogallala Commons I had a great time at the intern orientation because I was able to learn how to befriend other people easily which normally scared me. It was also nice to have a direct contact to go to in case I had any questions.