Indiana INTERNnet celebrated internship excellence on Feb. 4, 2015, at the 9th Annual IMPACT Awards luncheon. Though the event is over and the winners have been announced, we are continuing to celebrate the nomineesā successes.
These are their stories.
IIN: You were the first junior to serve as the Career Center for Opportunities (CCO) Ambassador Coordinator Intern. Tell us about your responsibilities in that role and what it meant to be trusted with that as a junior?
EL: As the Ambassador Coordinator Intern, I helped manage 12 student ambassadors to ensure proper training, growth and performance while they supported the Purdue student body with professional development. This included the planning of a two-day onboarding session, bi-weekly training sessions, schedule creation and monitoring, evaluations and goal setting, as well as project management.
Having all these responsibilities as a junior really grew my leadership abilities and taught me time management and critical thinking skills. Acquiring these learnings early on helped me utilize them in my summer internship and final year at Purdue.
IIN: We understand you led the charge to institute an online scheduling system. Thatās a big project! What made you want to take on that responsibility and what did you learn?
EL: I felt I had the technical and CCO organizational knowledge to understand the requirements of such a system and how it needed to function within the CCO to be useful. The system would allow for the CCO to interact with students more efficiently and also lead to better capture and analysis of data, which is a passion of mine.
From the experience of implementing the system, I learned quite a lot. It was the first time I worked on such a large-scale project, and I gained a host of project management skills. It taught me how to communicate to stakeholders and manage expectations, how to efficiently train new users of the system, and how to support the system and help customize it to fit the changing needs of the CCO.
IIN: You had the opportunity to design your own internship at the CCO. What were you looking to accomplish for the CCO and what professional qualities/skills were you looking to gain for yourself?
EL: For my last semester I was really looking to utilize my existing skills to help the CCO any way I could. That meant I was working with both the ambassador program and other areas of the CCO to do things like implement the scheduling system, analyze data, create reporting tools and present on key findings from such efforts. I was looking to utilize and build on my data, statistics and technology skills that I gained from previous internships and curriculum to help the CCO understand their operational data and turn it into useful information. It was a privilege to get to plan my last semester around my strengths and really finish off a great three years at the CCO.
IIN: Your IMPACT Awards nominator wrote that you told her several times, āI have THE best job on campus!ā Why did you say that?
EL: I felt there were very few places on campus that would allow for a student intern to have such responsibility and input into the organization. The CCO really values the ambassador program and all the student employees they have, which makes everyone work hard, think creatively and commit to bettering students and helping them with their professional development.
IIN: You graduated from Purdue University this May. Congratulations! What is next for you?
EL: Starting this July I will be working for Microsoft as a Support Engineer in Fargo, North Dakota. I am very excited for such an opportunity and feel that my experience with the CCO played a key part in preparing me for such a position.
