An Eye Opening Summer

Over the course of this past summer, I was fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to be a marketing & recruiting intern for a MedSpan Research, a healthcare market research firm. For starters, I have never completely known what I wanted to do with my life or which field to go into, which made looking for an internship even harder. I ended up applying to a wide variety of internships throughout the Chicago-land area. After thinking it over, I had decided that this internship interested me the most and was probably the best way for me to get my feet wet in the business world. It first interested me when I found out that it was only a company of 7 people. Now as small as that is, I saw it as an opportunity where I would working with a close knit group that would ultimately lead to me experiencing an environment that challenged me with different types of tasks each day. Fortunately, I was correct. My summer internship at MedSpan Research taught me many different items because I did a wide variety of tasks throughout the summer. In the beginning, they had me start with marketing projects. This included cleaning up databases and combining information in order to increase efficiency within the workplace. When I wasn’t working on marketing projects, I would be assisting with recruiting respondents to help us with our market research.

            Overall, I would have to say that my summer at MedSpan Research was an extremely positive experience that I will carry with me for the rest of my life. While I was there, I felt that I improved many technical skills that I will be able to apply to almost everything that a future job consists of. For instance, I worked with other interns on projects, improving not only my communication skills, but also my team management skills. Another technical skill that I felt I enhanced was my proficiency with excel. Most days I would be working on projects on that, learning new tricks and codes that would reduce the amount of time that I would have to spend on certain tasks. Most importantly, I gained patience while working. Sometimes, the tasks were very tedious and would take a long time, but I would have to be patient and just push through. Patience is not something I had before and I know that it’ll improve my character in many ways. Not only did I improve technical skills, but I gained the feeling of accomplishment. At one point, an employee came up to me and told me exactly how a project I had done benefited him during his last business meeting. It felt really good to know that the work I was doing was making an impact within the organization. In the end, this internship made me feel stronger on my decision to go into business!