In my internship so far, I have experienced a fair amount of ambiguity. The main thing that I have been struggling with is not having a direct supervisor. Since I am working across marketing, communications, consulting, and sometimes event coordination, there is not one specific person that I report to. The positive side of that is that I’m able to work across several departments and gain more experience and knowledge about how they operate than I would if I were exclusively a marketing intern. The downside is that it can feel at times like I don’t have a clear direction for what types of tasks I should be doing.

Previously, the head of the marketing and communications department for all of the Impact hubs in Spain created a shared document with tasks that I could do and deadlines for each of them. People that I work with across all of the departments are able to add tasks for me that I would be able to help with and they usually notify me when they add something and set up a meeting with me to talk about what they are expecting. As far as tasks that I have had to do, the directions given to me have been pretty clear. If along the way I feel like directions are unclear, I always ask the team member that assigned it to me if the work I’m doing is what they asked for. Almost everyone that has added to the document has been really good about talking to me and saying clearly what they are looking for.

There are two people that I have had less communication with and will only write one sentence under task description. In the past week I have had this issue of something being added with little detail and have had to find another way of figuring out what they were looking for. I would try to start on the project but find that I needed guidance in terms of what direction to go to make sure that what I was giving them back was what they wanted and that I wouldn’t complete it and end up sending back something that wasn’t helpful. I tried to reach out to the person that gave me this assignment and asked a few clarifying questions saying that I want to make sure that we are on the same page. She ended up not responding to my message and I wasn’t sure what to do so I had to talk to several people to learn more about the project and fill in the blanks myself. I had to send messages asking for more information about the project itself and asking for access to the work that had been done before to make sure that what I was doing was on the right track.

Something that I had to do for another similar situation was to get the work I was supposed to do early. I chose to send it to her two days before the deadline and send it to her saying that this was my progress so far and if she could give me some feedback as to if this was what she was looking for. Fortunately, she responded quickly and gave me some notes of things that she would want changed. When I turned it in to her on the due date, there weren’t any issues, and she was able to apply the work I did to the project that she was working on. Had I not completed everything early and sent it to her as a draft, I might have ended up turning something in that was not what she wanted and ended up setting back the timeline. Personally, I would always rather double check before completing something with my own interpretation at the risk of doing something incorrectly and then affecting the schedule. Something else that I have been having issues navigating is not having one designated supervisor. Since I am working across three to four departments, there is one person in each that I have been working most closely with, but I don’t have one supervisor that I always report to. Who I talk to depends on what project I am working on and what office I am in depends on where a meeting is happening or where the people, I’m working with on a specific project are that day. For all day-to-day questions that I have, I know who I should be talking to but if I have a more general question outside of a project that I am working on, I’m not sure who I should go through or if there is someone else that I should meet with. At this point I’m not really sure how to navigate that since nobody seems to have an answer for me but in the next weeks when I get started on a more long-term project, I should start to have a little more guidance.