The Golden Opportunity
Over the past few months I’ve grown. I have not only grown professionally, but I’ve grown personally as well. As stated by Susan B. Anthony, “The older I get, the greater power I seem to have to help the world. I am like a snowball — the further I rolled the more I gained.” As I grew older each day I saw myself gaining more knowledge and becoming more powerful.
This is a story about my internship experience with Cyber Cloud Networks Operations Artificial Intelligence (or even harder to say, CCNOAI). To start off, I am a Junior computer Science Student at South Carolina State University. Initially, I had an internship with the Department of Energy at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. However due to Covid-19, the Laboratory shut all internships down for the summer. After weeks of disappointment about my internship being cancelled another opportunity opened for me at CCNOAI.
During my first interview, I was so nervous, I was sure everyone could see it on my face. But that was nothing compared to the shyness and nervousness that came over me on my first day. On that day, I was given the lead on automating data flow and data governance. Really having no clue what to do and what that even meant, I relied on my personal need to be organized to come up with a strategy to get things done.
My first task was to organize the company’s daily objectives by finding out exactly what needed to be done. I saw that the company’s tasks were listed in a database, however, this database was disorganized and cluttered. In other words, tasks were all over the place and there was no structure to be found. I had to figure out how to streamline the database and make it visually appealing.My first step was to sort company objectives by their due date. I then created a formula which would highlight a task by their due date. On top of that, I coded a process which removed tasks marked as done or cancelled off the list, just to add more organization and clear view to the database. When I finished, the CEO said that the tool increased the teams productivity by 50%, because everything that needed to be done was organized and easy to find. Even though the finished product was great. It took so long for me to get there. The biggest challenge I faced with this tool was the back and forth transfers between Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel, so the tool could be shared across all users. To overcome this challenge, I put in extra time watching videos and reading articles to find different solutions for each of the problems I encountered.
I realized that my personal need to be organized guided me to complete my first assignment and gave me momentum to successfully complete my first internship. Furthermore, it laid the foundation for me to grow professionally and personally. Overall, my summer internship with CCNOAI has been an amazing experience. I’ve gotten so much out of this experience that I don’t think I would be able to get working with a different company. For that, the circumstances that brought me to this internship has provided me with a GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY!
