If the internship was equivalent to a company's financial year, this would be about time I would be reporting the Q1 performance. Yikes!!! what a scary thought. Three weeks...and no sign of the killer insights I'm supposed to deliver at the end of my internship. Three weeks and no economic value added. I'm sure my managerial accounting Prof. would be so disappointed.
However, over the past weeks I have been able to better formulate the questions that I'm seeking answers to and identify the people outside and inside the company who can help me answer them. Initially the problem to be solved didn't seem that difficult. I was confident that either the precision weaponry of Operations or mass destruction capability of corporate strategy would be enough to slay these demons. After all, how big can the problems of a small company be? But I guess the real complexity is in how and where to get the facts that define the problem.
The good thing about interning with an early stage company, I believe is that there is lot of room for contributing your own ideas. At the same time as there is little to no past data that you can base your decisions on, there is constant need to find information from outside sources. And if you are coming from a background where you have worked for large corporations in the past it takes a change of mindset to get used to the new way of getting things done. However, so far I have liked the freedom of being able to not only decide how to execute the project but also to decide the sources that I will use to come to the project conclusions.
So, I spent three weeks understanding the problem and may be formulating a vague strategy to solve it. Does that mean I added any value to the company? Wish there was a way to report that on a quarterly statement.
(325 words)
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