Overall, my time here is completely self structured due to the lack of other coworkers and supervisors. And with that, comes a set of challenges, one of the largest being lack of access to readily available information. It would be one thing if I could peak into another room and get the confirmation or feedback I need, but I can’t. I have to wait for my message to whoever to be seen which can take anywhere from a few minutes to an entire day. Due to my superiors working remotely for the duration of their summer vacations, it is hard to get clarification or direct orders from them. At the beginning of my time here, we sat down and discussed everyone’s goals and aspirations for the duration of the internship. During that time I obviously took notes and put somewhat of a mental plan for the following two months together.
At times that I cannot get complete information or feedback from my supervisors, I refer back to my notes from that meeting to try to help me figure out what nexts steps should entail. With that said, sometimes I cannot reach those next steps without confirmation or explicit feedback from my supervisors. When I encounter these circumstances, I simply put my current task aside, and move onto another one. There is no sense in sitting there, stubbornly trying to figure something out when I will just end up chasing my own tail in circles .
The company I work for is small, and I am one of the only people that actually work on site. I have minimal contact with the other employees as they are working remotely in other countries, and as a result, I cannot really approach them for help. And given the nature of my work, there is no overlap in knowledge or experience with my coworkers as we are operating in completely different fields. For instance, I am currently working on a rather big project that requires me to not only perform outreach to prospective brand partners, but also track how much traffic comes from their platforms to our app. The company has had an account with a link tracking website for over a year, but no one had ever used it. With that said, I was essentially the first one to experiment with this tracking platform. I was stuck for over two weeks, trying constantly to get it to work correctly. Upon asking my supervisors and other coworkers for any input or guidance, I was told that I had the most knowledge of the application…implying that I was alone on this endeavor and had to just figure it out. This was a little daunting due to the success of my larger project being contingent upon this application working correctly. However, with a little more thought and help from customer service, I was able to get it working as intended and am able to move forward with my project.
Another example of when I need to adjust how I operate here when I don’t have direct access to my supervisor is during my outreach meetings with influencers and content creators. During the first meeting, my supervisor was present and was there to negotiate the terms and payment for the partnership. But when I have these meetings without him present, it is more of a drawn out process as I have to make a report and summary of the meeting and show him before I can move forward with any spending or other decisions.
I also rely on current connections and relationships to help guide me through this process. There are so many things I have yet to learn about working in a professional environment and have been learning from current connections some tips and tricks to work efficiently and operate during those times of uncertainty when I cannot reach my supervisors, which ash been helpful. They obviously cannot fill in any information that I am missing that is company specific, but they offer me tips to navigate my situation.
