First Work Week

I was unsure of what to expect walking into the doors of KPMG Monday morning. I was both incredibly nervous for the first day of my first internship, but also ready to officially start my summer. Sweating in my suit, I shakily approached the main desk, butchering “Mluvite Anglicky?”, hoping she spoke English. As I came to learn, the receptionist, along with most of her colleagues, spoke conversational English. After meeting with a HR rep, I was taken to my desk to meet with my boss and start my work. I was given almost 1 million lines of code to read through and understand. Armed with my  two laptops and one monitor, I read away. It was not easy. I was tasked with working with a software called Archimate. It is a business modeling software that many of my colleagues use in consulting. All of Archimate’s code is available for free on a popular software sharing website called Github, so I had to download it and learn everything I could. The end goal is to add some functionality to the software to help out the Managerial Consulting department of KPMG. I got very overwhelmed my first day and did not feel like I was going succeed with work. It was a rough feeling. Without any help from a team of coworkers and no help from Google, I felt stranded and alone. I went home the first day, defeated, and called my mother. After a classic parental pep talk, I went to bed with a new attitude of approaching work. I had to understand that this was a fantastic opportunity that not everyone can take advantage of and move past the difficult moments. Sometimes work will be hard, sometimes you will feel defeated, but at the end of the day, I am still going home to an apartment with my friends in an amazing foreign country. Going into my second week of work, I am a little nervous. I want to feel positive about what is to come, but the reality is, I am not confident that I will complete my tasks. My goal is to break each task down into sub tasks and just try to complete as much as I can each day. I often overthink small tasks, believing that they will take longer than the do, and discourage myself from trying. I will try to avoid this in an effort to keep a positive attitude about my internship.