Question

What information, concept, or teaching best prepared you for your internship experience? What do you wish you had known or understood at the beginning of the term?

Answer 1

I possessed very limited knowledge about the Corporate software packages because of my initial reservations with computer technology. I never boosted my own technical skills with the belief that I may perhaps be not good at it. During my internship, I had to deal with SAP Software. The basics of SAP were taught to me during my classroom training but I never had any hands-on knowledge about this tool. However, the only thing that favored me immensely was my relevant knowledge of MS Office software package that I learnt generally, at my own interest, much earlier, at an undergraduate level and especially the knowledge of MS Excel, to sail through my internship successfully. The Corporate where I was working, had an alignment of MS Excel with that of the SAP software for exporting of reports and analyzing thereupon. My knowledge of Excel was practically put into test when I had to deal with huge number of data and extracting the same through SAP. The number crunching for my seniors became easier in the manner I would present the data. I would make the presentation user-friendly. Pie charts and other graphs, various fields of data for better comprehension of the topic so dealt with, etc., made me avail a lot of appreciation from my HR team during the internship. I realized how my knowledge of MS Office, made me feel comfortable to gradually explore to various higher and relatively complicated software and integrate the same with my basics.

I now wish, had I comprehended the importance of my own technical skills better at the classroom level or had the Professors been more empathetic about even the basic but high utility software like MS Office, before taking us to the floors of internship, I would have performed better because that would have made me prepared to deal with more complex software with an open mind. My initial reservations made my journey slower than it would have otherwise been, had my basics were polished at the classroom level itself. However, when all my technical learning is combined, I believe I did a fairly good job at internship in dealing with a new software and understanding the significance of my previous technical learning.