A home for my fleeting thoughts.: My last summer

For the past 3 months, I had the privilege to intern at a consulting firm.

Today's my first day without work, and looking back, I thought it was a pretty good experience. There were definitely times when I groaned and whined in the morning, but it doesn't discount some of the good times I had. In fact, I thought the whole internship could be so much better if I didn't let my personal feelings affect my emotions at work.

As a HR intern, I was responsible for mostly HR projects, although I did a fair bit of other work including cold calling. On my first day, I was thrown into cold calling without ANY training, and my first call ended up to be a Mandarin speaking uncle. Fumbled so much because I didn't manage to go through the Chinese script prior to the call. Thankfully, my Chinese was quite zai la, so it turned out successful! lol.

I spent a bulk of my time on this task called 'Functional Competencies', where I had to download all of Workforce Development Agency's (WDA) competencies standard, copy the information one by one to an Excel sheet, and then compiling it into a Word guidebook. I swear it is the most tortuous and boring thing I had to do. Someone said, 'this kind of copy and pasting can do until you drool one'. I think he meant that one could stone and still continue the task. Agreed.

Nonetheless, I had the opportunity to meet clients and attended two focus group discussions. Even though I was just there to type away (for four hours nonstop!), I could totally relate what I learnt in school with reality! Facilitating a discussion is never an easy job, so it was interesting to see how the directors go about doing it. Very, very fulfilling.

That being said, I think the most important factor in deciding a fun and a not-so-fun internship is the company. Not the organisation, but the friend-company. There were about 14 interns in a 30-50 sized firm. Imagine the dynamics here. Due to space limitation, it was difficult for 14 of us to share a small workspace with the full timers. Hence, we demarcated a separate training room as our boundary. We played ping-poing, contract bridge, and even threw stress balls around. I'm guilty of the first 2. Haha. But of course, our ethic is that we work hard and we play hard. All these wouldn't be possible if we didn't finish our work. I think these spurts of fun and entertainment really bonded us as a group.

Moving forward, this internship helped me chart my career options. I still don't know what I want, but I definitely know what I don't want. Consulting isn't something for me, because I prioritise work-life balance a lot. By a lot, I mean ALOTTTTTT. It's something I discovered only this summer. I don't want to bring home work. I don't want to be sending work-related emails at 3am. Many have told me this isn't possible even outside of the consulting industry. True, but for consulting, it's worse. At least I could try my luck outside. Everyone has different priorities. It happens to be this for me. For now, I'm just gonna look forward to my last year of school, and hopefully one more internship!

Photo time!
For memories sake