I took DIGIT 495 in Summer 2021. I interned in the IT department at Erie Insurance as an IT Analyst. Here I have posted weekly notes I took throughout the course of the internship about my experiences and what I learned. Also as a requirement for this course I had to ask my manager at Erie Insurance to fill out two evaluations for me, one at midterms and the other at finals.
This was my first week as an intern at Erie Insurance, so a lot of my time was spent on setup and some training. Monday was a little bumpy, a lot of the interns including myself had some tech issues that we had to get sorted out. Eventually, we did get it. I and the two others in my group who started with me were all online by Wednesday morning. The rest of my week was meetings with my mentor to introduce me to some of the programs used at Erie. On Thursday we started going over the processes for the work I will be doing with her during the summer. She said that we will be working parallel so that I can learn easier and not just be thrown into something completely new. She has been very helpful and patient so far, and I think working with her will be a good experience.
This week was pretty similar to the last, another wave of interns started on Monday so it was still a lot of orientation. My mentor met with me almost every day and continued to explain the processes of what we will be working on, and even assigned two reports for me to do on Service Now. I had a bit of trouble at first, I looked for things in the wrong places. But she was willing to call and help me sort everything out so I feel like I have a better understanding of how the site operates and how to create reports. Then on Friday, I met with our team's manager to get to know each other a bit and to discuss Erie and future plans. It was a really nice conversation and it is amazing to know how dedicated Erie employees are to making their interns feel welcome and supported. He even offered to set up a meeting with me with some of the employees who work on more digital media related projects because I am a DIGIT major and he wants to give me every opportunity to grow that he can. I'm really impressed with the community and the environment at Erie, their standards are clearly carrying over even while working remotely. I'm glad to be a part of this team.
This week I got into working on more assignments. I helped update descriptions and toward the end of the week, I was tasked with creating releases for July-December. I think I figured it out pretty quickly. Also, I am starting to get a better understanding of how to operate in ServiceNow with the help of my mentor. Another thing I did this week was attended more intern events. The first was an intern kickoff where all of the interns introduced themselves and got to meet some employees who work with organizing the intern events. The second was a career development session. I believe they said there will be several more of these throughout the internship. In that meeting, they taught us how to build ourselves up professionally and utilize social media to do so. It was interesting to listen to and I am curious to see what they will talk about in the next one.
This week I was introduced to SharePoint and was asked by my mentor to use HTML to help them design a webpage for IT Services. I haven't yet been able to get the exact look she requested, but I was able to get links to the other pages to work. I also participated in more intern networking events, one of which talked about Erie's affiliation with different charities and nonprofits. We were encouraged to start looking into them and consider volunteering or supporting them in any way we can. Then, my core team talked to us about the intern summer projects that we will have to present at the end of the summer. My mentor hasn't yet talked to me about what mine will be, but I'm hoping she will have more information for me next week.
This week my mentor told me what my official project for the summer will be - I'll be working on Continuous Release Expansion. She is also having me work on the team's SharePoint page as a side project. It's taking me a little while to get used to writing code in SharePoint, but hopefully, I'll be able to figure some things out soon. This week I also worked on editing educational PowerPoints used to inform employees of the different release processes. I updated information so that it remained relevant and I did a little bit of moving around to make the slides more visually appealing. Friday afternoon I met with a member of the Talent Acquisition team for a get to know each other meeting. I think it really speaks to how much Erie values every employee no matter how new, young, or inexperienced that fellow employees set up meetings just to learn about you.
This week was pretty slow again. During a meeting with my mentor and manager, they discussed what they want me to work on. My manager hasn't yet met with me to give me details and instructions but hopefully, that will come soon. Most of what I've been doing is checking on and updating the release descriptions when new changes are added and attending meetings.
This week I was assigned the same thing I did for the June releases but for the July ones. I am in charge of updating the descriptions as changes are added. I am also in charge of assigning tasks to release managers. As for my intern core group, our meeting this week was just a fun icebreaker meeting.
This week was really slow, I asked my mentor if she had more work for me and she actually said no. She told me that there wasn't a lot going on at the moment so all I needed to do was attend meetings and keep assigning tasks and updating release descriptions.
This week was very slow again, I still haven't been given any new work to do. My mentor isn't meeting with me anymore either, and I'm unsure of what is supposed to be happening at this point. I feel like I should have a lot more work to do than just two things that take me 5 minutes to do each day. I don't know if maybe this is my mentor's first time with an intern or if she is just really busy right now, but I feel kind of like I'm not doing a whole lot. This upcoming week I plan to reach out to my supervisor and see if he has any advice or any work for me to do.
This week was actually pretty busy and I really liked it! I was part of the first group of interns to participate in the Intern Innovation Experience Project. All week I had to attend a meeting 8am-12pm. In these meetings we learned about innovation, interviewing skills, idea organizing, and problem-solving skills. I worked on a team with four other interns whom I had never met before and we collaborated to find issues and come up with solutions for them. I was even interviewed by another team for their project! It gave me a good opportunity to practice public speaking because I had to answer questions from my peers and also help present my group's project. Overall is was a nice week and it felt great to have a change of pace and actually work on something sizable.
This week was a lot of preparing for our final presentations. Our core team worked individually on preparing our slides. On our slides were had to include a brief introduction and information about our internships, such as our position and mentor. Then we had to write out everything we learned/did during the summer to contribute to ERIE. Then Thursday we all met and we did a practice run-through of our presentation, we each got 5 minutes to speak, totaling about 30 minutes for the entire presentation. It went pretty well and there was no need for any major revisions. The presentation is coming up fast and next week will probably also be a lot of preparing for it.
I completed my final intern presentation this week and it went pretty well. My manager even made a comment saying: "Impact for each continuous release that Amaya helped promote estimated 2 week improvement for time to market." My internship finishes on Friday next week, August 13th. I thought that this internship was a good first internship for me to have, I like the way ERIE treats it like a learning process instead of just throwing interns in not knowing what to do. I appreciate the flexibility the company has and how they do their best to find a spot for everyone in the ERIE family. I look forward to hopefully continuing to intern at ERIE so I can gain even more experience and learn valuable skills. I want to say a quick thank you to my manager Derek Storolis, my mentor Sara Kaput, and everyone else involved in the internship experience at Erie Insurance. These people put in a ton of time and hard work to make sure all of the interns were growing, learning, and enjoying their time with the company.
Just an update: after my summer internship ended I was offered the opportunity to continue working throughout the school year and to return for the following summer as well. After a month I was transferred from the Release Managers team to the User Experience team. This team seems like it will fit my interests and my major better, so I am excited to see how it will turn out.