Reflective Questions
What were your expectations about your internship before you joined?
My expectations were as detailed by the supervisor to be working with the IT department to complete a project which kept track of the efficiency of each department. They could take on the additional help to do so. I believed there would be coding involved or a coding environment readily available to use. I expected to be looped into regular weekly meetings as check-ups with the supervisor or a direct person I could go to for help.
What was the reality? How was it different from your expectations?
The company used platforms I was completely unfamiliar with. I worked with a few different departments outside of my own one. Customer Service as an example. Requirements for projects could change quickly and new additions requested. The validity of data needed to be tested again to ensure that they matched the current report. The company was experiencing an extremely busy period; I found that I needed to be working independently and ask for help sparingly. There was a lot of pressure working directly with team leads and directors of the company.
What lessons were the most important from your internship. Why were they important?
Communication is extremely important, and to log notes of your progress so that all your tasks are documented. They use a ticketing application for tasks that need to be completed. The platform designates a task to a user, and they work, providing updates and asking for feedback from the reporter of the task aka the customer. Always keep the customer / reporter updated with each step you take in the project, seek approval and clarification.
After your workplace experience, what would you say your value proposition would be to an employer? How can you demonstrate this?
I studied existing reports that feed off live data on SAP-HANA tunnel and found loading time issues in the report which required simplification. The current dashboard prioritised design over functionality, leading to a slower run time. I did my best to preserve the look of the dashboard while improving the speed at which it runs. My value is manufacturing data pipelines and combining the dimensions from master data tables to create models which solve business problems. I can identify obscure issues report on them, aiming to optimize efficiency.
How did your internship influence the type of role in which you are interested? Dashboarding and reporting was the most significant part of my internship experience, and I quite enjoyed using the live company data to build visualizations that conveyed the journey of customer sales data overtime. I commenced the internship wanting to be a data engineer who worked on the end-to-end pipelines. While this is still appealing to me as it incorporates coding skills and querying, I enjoy reporting and data analysis.
