The first week of my internship was both completely new and entirely familiar. I have been working for Phoenix on and off for the past three or four years as needed, but this summer I am officially interning for the company and thus my assignments are different than before. This past week I was charged with learning about the wearable technology industry and using research that the company has previously done to create infographic scorecards for the top companies in the industry that will be used to show these companies that they need the help of Phoenix Marketing. I also sat in various meetings with different groups throughout the company and found that while much of the content went over my head, I learned a lot about business in general.
I had never thought about infographics as sales aids before, but after looking at the data that Phoenix had collected and researching the wearable tech industry, I agreed that this was a great way to present companies with information that could help them and potentially move them to find out more about what Phoenix can do. This process has taught me how to pick out important pieces of data and present them in a visually appealing way, and I am very excited about the potential these infographic scorecards hold. Hopefully they will be ready for next week's update, and I will be able to share them here.
This project has been different than work I have done for Phoenix previously, because it has been much less rigid as far as what needs to be done. Previously I have been entering or checking data, which is fairly easy to do and required me to follow a process that was laid out for me. If I had questions they were usually easily answered. Creating these scorecards, however, had fewer specifications and barely any process to it at all. I struggled at first to understand how to begin, but after I worked at it a bit I found myself enjoying the work I was doing.
Sales in the Startup is the most recent Entrepreneurship class that I have taken, and though Phoenix is no longer a startup company, I have found many of the lessons that I learned in class to be at practice within the company. For instance, Sandler Rule #39, when all else fails, become a consultant. Though it is not a result of other options failing, we are endeavoring to provide wearable tech industries with valuable consulting information via these scorecards and further documents in order to gain a relationship with their companies and to find out if the our company and their company would make a good match. I am excited that I am able to see lessons that I've learned in class applied in a real world situation, and I feel validated that the work I have done and am doing in school will help me in the world of entrepreneurship in the future.
At the beginning of the week I attained a small notebook and a nice pen that I brought with me to every meeting that I attended, and took notes the entire way through. I often found myself writing questions to ask later, as well as bits of wisdom that I wanted to remember. Right now my notes are disorganized and some pages are more helpful than others, but I will continue to take these notes throughout the summer and I hope to go through them all at the end of my internship and include the lessons that I've learned throughout this experience and the questions that I still have in my final internship post. I have never approached working for Phoenix as a learning experience before, but with a change in mindset to see it that way I have already learned so much after just one week, and I cannot wait to see what else I'll learn throughout the summer.
