Week Two: Let People Do What They Do

My big lesson for this week was to let people play to their strengths, especially when I don't have the same strengths.  In working on the infographics this week I hit a dead end and we sent the document to another woman who works for the company in marketing.  In less than twenty four hours she had taken the same graphics and statistics that I used, but put them together in a way that they fit on the page cohesively, lent themselves to a reading flow, and were visually appealing.  The final product still is not ready, but I am going to attach the different iterations of the infographics up to this point to show the work that I've done.  I started with Apple in order to get a template that could be used for each of the companies, and after receiving the new and improved versions back changed the data to apply to each of the other companies.

This is the initial infographic that I created

This is the second iteration, which I tried to incorporate a call to action.  I struggled to make all of the elements fit cohesively in this version.

This is the version that was done by the woman in marketing.  

This is an iteration of the infographic for which I used the version the other woman created and altered it for Garmin.

I continued to see pieces of my classes at work this week.  One instance that really hit close to home for me was in a progress meeting for one of the projects that the company is currently working on.  One of our partners wanted to charge more than had been previously agreed upon for a project that was to commence the next day.  We discussed ways to do the project without this partner, but ultimately decided that we had to swallow the cost because the client was expecting us to use this partner and we wanted to deliver what we promised we would.  This reminded me of my Sales project this past semester.  My group mates and I were doing a fundraiser in which we partnered with our local ice cream shop and sold our professors ice cream cups to surprise their students with at the end of the semester.  It was a hugely successful project from which we learned a lot, but on the night when we scooped the ice cream to fulfill our orders we realized that we were going to need twice as much ice cream as we thought, and we had to decide whether to deliver very small cups of ice cream or to swallow the additional cost and deliver a satisfactory product to our professors.  We decided to swallow the additional cost and deliver a satisfactory product, but we were ultimately lucky in that we were mistaken about the original cost and ended spending the same amount of money that we initially planned on.

In just the first two weeks of this internship I have already learned so much and seen so much of my schoolwork at play in "the real world."  I'm really enjoying this experience and I'm excited to see what the rest of the summer holds.