Final thoughts- Never stop learning

-Hi everyone, I am one week away  to finish my internship, so this last blog may reflect some mixed feelings. Of course, I want to go back to business school, but as I’ve been saying before, my internship has been a great experience.  First, I had relevant and very interesting projects, second I have a great work-life balance that allows me to take advantage of NYC and third, New York itself, which is a great city to be in the summer with tons of free activities.

To wrap up my blog series, I am going to talk about the final presentation. During my last post I talked about a group project, do you remember that? Well, once we submitted the project, we needed to present to the top senior leaders of the organization, our managers and the rest of summer interns. Basically the auditorium was filled with around 50 people. The combination of the quantity and quality of the audience were factors that created a very stressful, and busy week. I am not the type of person who likes practicing presentations, but given the context, we practiced 6 times. The good thing, is that the official presentation wen very well. We were able to convey a heavy-data-driven project, and all our international accents with some fun examples, which helped to engage the audience and make the presentation more interesting.  Two big take aways of this final presentation: Again, a group works in which is important to establish roles and identify peoples’ strengths to divide better the presentation and set a positive tone, or simply manage the flow.

 Also, as international student, I would say that I had to step back and be humble to asses this US professional landscape, learn more things and be very open to feedback. Back in Mexico, I was so used to give presentations to big audiences and important people that I hadn’t had feedback for a long time ago, but in this context, I did, and it made me change my mindset for good, as I realized that there are always ways to improve. This conclusion was a constant during my internship. I got 6 years of work experience before coming to the MBA, and, at least for our group project, I was the one with more experience. I can say that this professional experience definitely  helped me to navigate Citi as a big organization, create good networks, solve business problems and approach the things that I was asked to do.

However, sometimes experience may cause less willingness to learn or take feedback. Nonetheless, I was impressed by the things that I learned from many people, as I’ve been saying, Citi is a very diverse organization, in every sense.  I found that I always had something to learn. Yes, I know, an MBA candidate has to be open to learn always new things, but the truth is that many times it is more a mantra than something that people take into practice. So, this summer I really practiced doing this, learning by doing and being very open to feedback with a true willingness to improve. Which in the end, may turn to be a good impression when feedback is internalized and put in practices. Not only for the summer, but also in general for a good professional life.  Finally, I think that by keeping this mindset, I am going to leverage more on my Ross classmates and learn the most during my last MBA year.