Hello again everyone from (virtual) Dublin, Ireland! I am now over halfway done with my data analysis internship with Wrkit, and I cannot believe how quickly it is going! I am finally really starting to see the implementations of the work I am doing and how my work is benefiting the company. This past week, I have enjoyed learning about the Irish and English culture (and more broadly European culture) through casual discussions about the UEFA European Championship soccer tournament before and after meetings. There has been a lot of friendly banter between my Irish and UK coworkers, and I am sure that will only intensify this week after England’s loss this weekend in the final to Italy.

As I reflect on what I have done with this internship to this point, I feel like I have already learned so many really meaningful things about working in a real-world setting, in addition to what I have learned about myself in this process. I have definitely developed several “soft” skills throughout the course of my experience, and the most important of those for me was communication. As someone who is not very outgoing, I have always struggled with communicating my thoughts effectively; however, because I have had to present my findings in front of the company at each weekly meeting, I feel as though I have improved my ability to articulate my ideas, thoughts, and opinions in a more effective and understandable manner. In addition to communication, one of the soft skills I have developed is time management. Having a set deadline at the end of the week to complete my analysis by has forced me to pace myself in a more efficient way in order to show up to meetings prepared and ready to present some of my findings. As independent as my position is within the company, I have also noticed that I have developed how I work in a team environment. Despite the fact that I do the majority of my work alone, I still have had a lot of interaction with various members of the Wrkit team to perform analysis on different sets of data. This has helped me develop my teamworking skills as I have had to effectively coordinate my work with either what is already known or what is needed and revise that work to better fit what my coworkers are looking for.

In addition to the soft skills I have developed, I have also learned several “hard,” or technical skills along the way, specifically regrading Microsoft Excel and Tableau. Since the majority of the work I have done so far has involved inputting and organizing data in Excel, I have been able to hone a lot of my Excel skills through real world practice and trial-and-error. The Excel skill that I have improved the most has been my usage of the VLOOKUP function. Despite always being told how important it is to understand VLOOKUP in many of my classes, I had never actually been given anything to help me practice or understand it, but through real world application of the function I feel much more confident in my ability to accurately and efficiently use the VLOOKUP function to make my life easier when working in Excel. Another skill that I was able to figure out in Excel because of my experience in this internship is how to easily split and combine columns of data. While I had learned how to split columns in one of my BIS classes, I had never learned how to combine split columns back together. Being that we use a different format for the date in the US than the Irish do, working with data that included the date of a particular transaction or contact was extremely difficult, as some of the dates would remain in the US format rather than switching to the Irish format. Because of this, I had to teach myself how to write a function for splitting and recombining columns in the correct order for the date so that I could then use the corrected data in Tableau. Likewise, before this internship, my experience with Tableau was limited to one 20-minute introductory lecture on Tableau’s capabilities. Since I had to find a more efficient way of displaying data than using the plotting features in Excel, I taught myself how to use Tableau at the beginning of my internship and have used it almost every day since then for my analyses.

Looking back, I am amazed how much I have learned and developed as a business professional in such a short time through my Virtual International Internship, but I am so excited to make the most of the last few weeks of my internship to learn even more! Until next time!