Blog #5

This summer I have learned so much about who I am as a professional, and who I want to be in the future. My internship has taught me so much about a field I'm interested in pursuing, and I could not be more pleased by how successful it has been. I think this was the best internship for engineering I could have had this summer and I would repeat it in a heartbeat. Spiral Water is a growing company, so they really needed my help and I got hands on, high level experience in many areas of engineering. I learned from very interesting, intelligent people, and it is very cool to have built relationships with. I'm grateful for the people I work with there, especially my supervisor who took time to give me a engineering lectures covering material I will be learning in college someday. At first I thought this class was slow-moving, but now I see that thoughtful reflection and understanding takes time, and I feel like I learned a lot about myself and am well-prepared for the real world. 

By analyzing strengths and weaknesses, I was able to identify things I was good at, like communication and dedication, and apply them to my work, but also identify things I needed to work on, and use the internship as a platform for improvement. I understood my values, passions, and aspects of my personality very well, but I had never tried to really articulate them and rank them like I did in the course. It is helpful to better understand myself, and always keep in mind how I view things and what's important to me.

This internship helped further my career readiness skills, but I believe that they will continue to grow as I experience more and more opportunities and workplaces. I believe that my weaknesses now have to do with who I am, and therefore I should continue to work on them. 

Discoveries forced me to take tests that analyzed who I am, but they also made me reflect on the answers. Reflecting made me understand and internalize the results. Reading them is one thing, but to take a step back and ask, "Okay, but why?", helped me put it all together and make connections about aspects of my personality.

The class used many technological platforms to access and produce information. I had experience with these before, but it was interesting to see how I could use them symbiotically to create a student profile that grew with me. 

Having had a lot of professional experience in my past, (jobs, job shadows, internship, etc), I think I had strong career readiness skills. It was still very important to work on them and always use them as motivation to perform well at my internship.

I am so grateful for this experience. I have learned so much from the class, and my internship was an irreplaceable, incredible opportunity. The internship allowed me to discover the field I want to pursue, and was a great adventure that taught me more than I dreamed of learning.