This summer I had the tremendous opportunity to intern at the Amarillo Area Foundation. I will never be able to express how thankful I am for all the knowledge I gained while I was there. There were highs and lows along with successes and failures.
I was challenged with three main projects:
- creating a financial advisors database for the 26 counties in the Panhandle
- cleaning up the scholarship recipient database
- interviewing past scholarship recipients
Prior to this internship I had never worked on a database, so that was difficult for me. I am very detail oriented, which helped, but when searching for potential contacts, I spent a lot of time making sure the contact information was correct and the these people were real and I lost time by doing that and ended up falling short in that area.
The scholarship recipient database seemed all over the place, especially at a first glance, very few students had contact information and majority of the students were entered multiple times. I successfully narrowed the list from around 7,000 to 2,000.
Although I did not get as many interviews as we had hoped for, this was my favorite project and it shined a light on many things for me. I have much to learn in the area of interviewing. I did learn that it takes some assertiveness to get good interviews and it was difficult at first especially because some people just simply don’t want to be interviewed or bothered and that was honestly my biggest issue. Also some give you very vague answers and that’s where you have to be a little more assertive and dig deeper. I’m not very skilled in that area, but I am eager to work on those skills.
Overall my internship experience was wonderful and I am so thankful to have had this opportunity. My supervisors Charlotte and Kaci were absolutely amazing. The receptionist Karen Phillips was also extraordinary. She served as guidance every step of the way. I not only learned what field I want to go in, but also things that I don’t like so much. Which is also important. I think internships provide you with job skills and an insight in to your future career. You also have the opportunity to network and make connections.
Ogallala Commons is one of the best organizations I have come across and I am very blessed. It’s been an incredible journey thus far and I cannot wait to see what the future holds.
