Chris - Reflecting on the summer

The most rewarding part of my internship had to be the group work my team and I completed throughout the program. I was fortunate to be paired off with a great group of interns to come up with a performance management workshop. This task was rewarding to me, because we started with no background on what performance management was. However by the end of the ten weeks, not only did we feel like experts, but we were also teaching other city employees about performance management. The workshop that we created got great feedback from all the participants and the city is going to use this workshop in the future. We started a brand new project and to see the final result get such great feedback was very rewarding.

Another experience that I fond very rewarding was when the mayor spoke to us at the final ceremony. He seemed to be very appreciative of the work we were doing and handed us all certificates for our achievements. There were several news stations filming this event, and I was able to watch myself on 6ABC later that night. It was a great experience to see that all of our hard work was did not go unnoticed.

While the commute wasn’t great, the most challenging part of my internship was interacting with high level city employees. For the performance management workshop, my team was constantly presenting information to other city employees. At first it was difficult for me as an intern, to feel confident enough to present, and even teach a lot of this information to employees much higher up in the city. However with enough time and practice, presenting to these employees came a lot smoother. The final stage in this project was to present what we have done to the mayor’s “A – Team” who are employees who work very closely with him. We all had to memorize what we were going to say and present to over forty people. Speaking in front of all these people was challenge, but since we spent so much time practicing what we were going to say, and presenting to smaller groups, we were still very successful.

Chris Louin

Electronic Commerce