The Southwest Airlines Experience
First Steps — How I got to Southwest
When I first got the call that Southwest wanted to interview me I was honestly confused. I had completely forgotten that I applied to the company — as I applied for many different UX positions and had a couple interviews before and got rejected by those companies. The whole job application process was a struggle. I applied to any UX positions I could find. I specifically wanted to work in the UX realm to gain more experience in the field and I really enjoy the usability testing and research process. It utilizes creative, investigative, and analytical skills all of which I find expand my thinking and help me grow as a person. Anyway, so after I got the call from Southwest I was worn out from all the applications and interviews. “Just another interview” I thought to myself.
The interview was for a UX Design Intern Role in Dallas, Texas. The recruiter told me there was no housing provided and the wage was pretty minimal. Honestly, I wasn’t too motivated to work for the company at first just because I did not want to relocate to Texas of all places, even though I had never been there I had some biases about the area. I thought it would just be a dessert with tumbleweed, cowboys and cacti. I have always been so resistant to change in my life that I always came up with hundreds of excuses as to why I didn’t want to do something. I did the same for this internship, but figured I’d interview anyway. I looked up the exact requirements of the job and found that it directly related to everything we were doing in HCDE. Doing competitive analyses, ideating, iterating upon designs, and using tools like Sketch and Marvel.
I went through the first round of the interview with the phone screen and knew I nailed the behavioral questions but I knew that I probably messed up with a question around what I enjoyed about a project because I didn’t answer it insightfully. I didn’t have a good feeling about it and was numb to rejections at that point so another one wasn’t going to affect me. A couple of weeks had passed and I completely forgot about the interview. I thought I was rejected but was also agitated by the fact that there was no correspondence on their part to inform me of anything.
A month later, when I got a call from the recruiter telling me they wanted to schedule an on-site interview I was shocked. I didn’t know what to expect with the on-site interview because it was only scheduled to last an hour. I was being flown out (a 3.5-hour flight) for a 1 hour interview. I guess the company is an airline, so it was perfectly fine for them but it still was pretty odd to me. Usually white boarding design interviews are much longer so I figured there wouldn’t be any of that. I prepared for this interview as I would any other, the worst that could happen is I get to spend a day in Dallas I thought.
When the interview day came around I was exhausted. I was getting through finals, getting ready for alternative spring break and had to go to this interview. I flew out to Texas after my last final and some final preparation sessions for alternative spring break. I felt prepared for the interview but had so much on my mind. I got to Texas on a Thursday evening and had the interview on Friday. When I first stepped foot into the Dallas Love Field Airport I noticed how humid the air was. It was strange to me how flat the land was and how there were actually trees around. I didn’t have time to do much as I just went to the hotel to get a good night’s sleep for the interview the next day.
The following morning, I got ready for the interview and went straight to the corporate office. The hotel had a shuttle right front which went directly to the corporate headquarters. When we drove into the area I was surprised by how huge the entire Southwest campus was. There was a huge building dedicated to flight simulators for pilot training, a whole area to fix planes and there were engineers working on them. Also, there were several office buildings. I never truly understood the size of the company until I got there that day. I had my interview at the corporate headquarters main building. Right when I walked in I noticed toy planes hanging from the ceiling. The building is designed in such a way to showcase the fun-loving spirit of the company. While I was waiting to be called in for the interview, the front desk group was really friendly and helpful. There was even a celebration going on and they handed me a bag of candy. Everyone seemed happy to be there and everything was bright and lively.
When I went in for the interview, the recruiter took me to a conference room where the manager of the UX team was sitting. We all introduced ourselves and then the recruiter got into the questions of the interview. The whole interview felt like a conversation rather than something formal. I felt comfortable talking to both of them and the questions focused a lot on the projects I went through in school. In HCDE we went through so many different projects through the years so I had a lot of content to draw from. I remember I even took Irini’s advice while interviewing and talked about the cross-cultural analysis project we did in the advanced communication class. That project was a project that the recruiter commented on because of how interesting she thought it sounded. As I talked about how to design for different cultures it seemed to be something that both the interviewers resonated with.
When the interview came to an end I felt good about it, but didn’t know if I had gotten the internship. I know how competitive the Southwest internship program is and they had probably interviewed several candidates. I got the call back the following week when I was in Neah Bay and had minimal signal. The recruiter thanked me for coming in and interviewing and talked about how great it went. At that moment, I thought I was being rejected but they were trying to soften the blow. When she told me, I got the job I was surprised. I asked for a few days to think about the offer and figure things out and she agreed. I was busy teaching kids coding but weighed the options and realized that this internship might be a really beneficial experience. I would get experience with the inner workings of a large company as well as learn how UX works in it. I called the recruiter back and accepted the offer a couple days later. Little did I know that it was one of the pivotal decisions that would change my life perspective forever.
Starting the Internship
I finished up school in the next couple months and had to fly straight to Texas to get started. The typical internship program for the company starts at the end of May and ends the first week of August. I had to change the dates of my internship to start right after finals, June 11th, and it was also extended till August 31st. All the intern events were all during the first couple weeks of the original start date so I ended up missing quite a few events to get an introduction to the company as a whole and interns in other departments.
When the first day came around I woke up early and was nervous about it all. I didn’t know what the company and people would be like and what if I didn’t know how to do the work they gave me? All of these questions were eating away at me. However, I had also heard that Southwest was supposed to have one of the best corporate cultures so I had high expectations for how the company would be and that put me at ease. I reached the office early and went through a second background check and got a badge. I got to the front desk pretty early and had to wait for about an hour before heading in with my recruiter and she gave me a brief run-down of all the policies at work and the flight privileges that we have. I also got information about the messaging and email systems the company uses for communication and how to go about logging into a portal set up for me. All the information I got within 1 hour is information that other interns got over the course of an entire day but I soaked up as much information as I could from the sped-up overview.
After the overview of everything I was brought to my manager who I had chatted with during the interview process and he showed me around the building, and where all the different departments were located. I was amazed at the size of the whole campus and how many different departments there have to be to run the entire company. I didn’t know some of these departments even existed! I also got an overview of the department I was in, marketing, and all the individual teams that exist within it and what they do. To this day, I still can’t name all the different teams and how they aid the department as a whole.
When my manager brought me to my desk I felt like I was back in junior high. My desk was decorated like you would any locker during birthdays. There were balloons and streamers and too much of my favorite candy, Twix. I was shocked at first that the team guessed my favorite candy spot on, but remembered an email my manager sent me weeks ago asking for information about me (including my favorite candy) which I found strange at the time. The gesture of the team brightened my day and I noticed that all the decorations were a norm in Southwest. As I passed by all the other cubicles I saw balloons, stickers, streamers, and memes scattered everywhere. The colorful office gave the whole area positive vibes when walking around.
After that showing me my desk, my manager just told me we were going to dive right in to the work going on. My manager, Evan, brought me straight to a meeting where I had no idea what was going on. People dove right in to start talking about the various projects they were working on and used various acronyms that I had never heard before. Evan introduced me to the whole room and I didn’t really know how I was supposed to present myself in front of all these individuals who clearly knew each other. Nevertheless, I nervously smiled and introduced myself and expressed my excitement to work with all of them. Everyone introduced themselves as well and I realized I had nothing to be afraid of. I found people in the office to be friendly and open and really saw the essence of the Southwest culture in that first meeting. People did work, but made their work fun and didn’t take themselves too seriously. This attitude itself put me at ease, I had a good feeling about this internship.
Usability Studies
Usability in the Field
I got to observe usability in the field for some new pages being tested. Southwest was redoing some of its rapid rewards pages to make them more understandable and well designed. They wanted to test whether the new rapid rewards information page made more sense and whether or not people were likely to use it. There were 4 different tasks and they basically tested the old page and the proposed page to understand how easy it was for participants to shop and understand the rewards program.
Southwest uses third party research consultants to conduct the usability studies so I got to meet a couple of people from Key Lime who facilitated and observed the sessions. They came from Florida specially to conduct these sessions and described how they work with several companies to conduct testing. Usability testing in various companies is very different depending on the industry. They both expressed how the healthcare industry usability testing is very cut and dry in the sense that there is a checklist with a list of standards and requirements for which the products have be in par with. For the bigger companies, there could be a lot of flexibility with testing and room for testing different things. Both people from Key Lime expressed they really enjoyed working with Southwest as a client because of the flexibility and creativity they use while creating these tests.
Anyhow, the usability testing was conducted in a research center Downtown Dallas. It was a facility specifically for companies or individuals to rent out to conduct any sort of research. At first, I didn’t understand the purpose of renting a specific facility to conduct these studies as there is plenty of space in the corporate office but when I got there I understood why. All the observers, including me and a couple other members of the team were placed in a room right in front of the testing room. We had the ability to see the entire testing room and there were speakers in the room as well so that we could hear everything going on as well. Furthermore, a large monitor in the observation room showed a video of the participant, their screen and their eyes being tracked as well.
It was honestly like observing a surgery from another room, except it was observing participant behavior. Even though the participants are debriefed about the fact that there are other observers, they don’t really acknowledge that fact and aren’t intimidated or uncomfortable when giving advice. The dynamic of the room changes when there is only one facilitator in the room running the study. The study is more focused and the participant knows who to focus on when giving feedback. When the observer is also in the room, the participant seems to filter what they are saying because they may feel that everything that they are saying is being noted.
The facilitator in the study didn’t go through the script verbatim. He made the participants feel at ease by making the whole study more conversational and natural versus formalized. If participants could not get to certain pages he guided them to the pages they needed to be at. In the observation room, it was easy to analyze what was going on and watching the eye tracking as the participant went through a task.
The whole experience felt very different from the usability studies conducted in school. These studies are making a direct impact on millions of people who book flights every day, and it was nice to see how the feedback was really being taken seriously and the changes were underway. The day in usability testing was truly a unique experience and I would love to conduct studies in the future and utilize all the new technologies.
Usability Studies Difference
I also found out that what we learned in school in terms of how to conduct usability studies may be. We learned how to create scripts and then observe participants as went through certain flows. After that we asked questions about what participants felt and record that data. However, what participants say and what they actually feel may not align. Participants may say that it was not too difficult to find a certain button and that a design is nice just because they don’t want to hurt the feelings of the person being tested.
As I mentioned before, there are devices that track the biometrics of participants, such as their arousal rates during certain tasks. Certain facial expressions could also be tracked to map out emotions such as disgust, happiness, surprise, etc. Furthermore, there is also software for eye tracking to understand where the participant looks every millisecond of the task. These devices make it possible to understand the physiological responses that participants have to certain interactions, which can in turn help us design any sorts of interfaces or devices even more effectively. Big companies are increasingly turning to these devices to usability test products because verbal feedback may not be the most accurate.
What was interesting when I was working with some of these things was that I was shown verbal data from participants as well as their biometric data. Finding some of the discrepancies was eye opening. Although for the most part the verbal feedback does match with the feedback, sometimes it was interesting to see how a participant may have verbally bashed the whole product but their biometric data just showed that they were at a baseline rate the entire time — meaning they were not as upset as they expressed in their reflection.
Being exposed to these devices gave me a broader perspective on usability studies. Studies should include verbal and biometric data as this gives us more holistic data when trying to make design decisions. The only barrier to entry for these devices was always their cost. Small startups or individuals conducting studies cannot easily buy these devices. Also, for some of the devices that track emotions and whatnot it takes about 20 minutes to get the participant hooked up which greatly increases the time spent to conduct each usability session. However, as these devices are now being developed into software, for example the eye tracking software and software that recognizes facial expressions are now permeating the market. These pose a much lower upfront cost as they are not physical devices.
A small company that Southwest initially used to conduct some of these usability studies bought the products as well because the cost was nothing compared to the benefits the company received in terms of the data it could collect. I think if I was exposed to some of these things in my college career it would have given me a broader set of data to work with and analyze for various projects. I’m glad I got this experience and exposure during my time at the internship though and I believe it’ll benefit me throughout my UX career.
Capstone Project
For my culminating capstone project, I tasked with digitizing the military fare system. There was a lot of discussion surrounding infant and military fare booking. Currently, Southwest does not have the ability make these bookings online. Calls are very expensive so digitizing this experience could cut down these costs significantly. The project first started with my manager giving me the task of doing a competitive analysis of competing airlines to understand their policies surrounding military fares and whether or not there is the ability to book with these fares online.
I find competitive analyses really informative and interesting. A significant amount of data could be analyzed from the sites and while investigating the competitor sites some unique and interesting ways of going about showing certain information is brought about. I had never really looked into airline sites until this task and when you’re looking for a specific piece of information it’s very different than just generally browsing a site. I enjoyed diving into the sites of all the different airlines and finding out if they had military fare information online. I even had to call a few of the airlines to inquire about their military information because it was not written online.
Calling other airlines to get this information was somewhat tricky. I had to be as objective as possible, most of the time the airlines thought I was a customer that was trying to book. When the customer support agents started asking me about booking flights I would have to just say I was just looking for information about military fares. These sorts of conversations get tricky because you are genuinely looking for the information but at the same time don’t want to be dishonest and pretend to be a customer when you have no intention of booking a flight. It can be difficult to assess what’s right and what’s wrong but a lot of the time it’s a gut feeling. Usually, if it’s something that harms the other party in any way then it is wrong, but things like getting information that everyone should have access to anyway may not be wrong. This is just my personal opinion about this and people may vary in their beliefs and ideals.
The interesting thing I found in the competitive analysis was that most airlines offered the military discount, but only one of them had the ability to apply this discount online (Figure 1). Southwest fell into that category, and United was the only one with full booking capability. This really is an area that Southwest could gain a competitive advantage in especially since the company has a reputation of honoring military members.
I talked to my manager about looking into this further and found that I could use these this as my capstone project. For my capstone, I then decided that I’d work on a way to digitize the military fare experience and find some more data around why this might be beneficial to the company. This project was my culminating project that spanned several weeks and took me a majority of the internship to complete. I had already started the project because I finished the competitive analysis of all the airlines but I had to figure out some more information around our current military fare policy and how useful digitizing this would be for the company. Then, I had to create a prototype to show how this would work.
I started out with contacting the customer support and service teams in order to get some data around customer support calls and their costs. I can’t reveal the exact numbers and data here, but basically the call costs are high and digitizing this experience would save the company a lot of money. Also, after calls there are surveys sent out to people about their call experiences and any suggestions they might have. These survey comments are then categorized and all the similar complaints are grouped together. When I asked customer support and service they found a significant number of comments around booking with military fares and customers wishing they could just book online.
I had to compile all this data and grouped the comments of military frustrations further into what the comments pertained to. I found that the majority were about not having the fare online, while a lot of the others were about the actual military fare policy itself. The military fare policy currently at Southwest is that there was a set number of flights available with military fares and on those flights, there are a set number of seats available to book with the discount.
This was a real struggle for military families especially since a majority of them don’t get to see their families for long periods of time. When the time came around to book a flight they would look up certain flights that they want to take and then find out that those flights don’t have any seats with the discount offered left, or worse, they would find out that that flight they chose doesn’t even offer military discounts. Seeing all of this frustration I didn’t want to design the digital system for the current policy but rather anticipate a change in policy that basically most flights offered the military fare, and it was just a discount that could be applied to any seat.
The design part took a long time because there was a lot of confusion around creating the design for usability testing versus just creating a well-polished prototype. I first created a prototype for usability testing that basically just had buttons on the price breakdown page for either a military fare or infant fare (because both of them are in similar categories currently. After choosing military fares the person would type in a code, which is a unique ID number issued after verifying military status on a third-party site, then only would they get the discount.
This begs the question of why a third-party site to verify the vendor, I researched into this and found that verifying military status requires a series of steps including going through official government documents that are all stored in one particular place. Only a certain number of agencies have access to these documents and there is government approval involved and in order to get this access. Southwest going through that whole process would take years so it would be best to ID people through a third-party site and then just type this code into the Southwest site to verify their military status.
The first iteration of the prototype was confusing in some ways because it was not intuitive where a person would find the change the fare type box. This box was at the very top and next to the “remove” and “modify” buttons. The manager expressed that this might confuse a customer because they would go through the whole flow not knowing what the discount even was and would only have the ability to apply it at the end. Also, this whole interaction was only taking place in a small part of the entire screen which might not have been the best way to structure it. I also had to look into some of the colors and fonts to match up with some of the brand standards.
For the second iteration, I changed the design so that it would be easier to verify military status by entering the ID on the homepage and look at the discounted prices when browsing flights. Also, the prototypes were made with the full webpages as opposed to parts of them which made them look complete. The fact that the military fares were displayed with the regular fares would give customers the ability to have complete fare transparency and better visibility as opposed to a small sized interaction flow at the side of the price breakdown.
The second iteration of the prototype was significantly better and my manager was visibly satisfied with it. At that point was when I realized how important it was to listen to feedback and implement it. It’s very different in a workplace as opposed to individual work. Working in a company as an employee essentially means all the work that you do is subject to change contingent to the opinions of executives and leaders. With work produced on your own, you always have the final say in that work. That being said, after creating the final design I had to compile all the initial data I collected and create charts and graphs of all the customer support and service data.
Figuring out what sort of charts to create took some time, just because I had all this numerical data about calls as well as qualitative data about the nature of calls. I didn’t know how to create figures that showcased all this data effectively, so I talked to my manager and the team about how to effectively show the data. This discussion really helped give me an idea how to breakdown data and what types of figures are effective for certain types of data. I think this was one of the key skills I learned while going through this capstone process and will definitely utilize this skill in the future. Data analysis is becoming an increasingly needed skill in the job market just because established companies utilize this data to keep up with the consistently changing society and have to keep changing their market strategies and nature of products accordingly.
Non-Revenue Flights
All airlines usually have some sort of “flight benefits” that come with working for them. Don’t think that that means free flights whenever you want because it really doesn’t. Basically, we are given the ability to list ourselves for certain flights on a space available basis. We were given access to a portal in which we could select trip routes and check which flights have space on them. Based on that you would select the best option flights for wherever you want to go and list yourself for those flights. You would get a confirmation email showing details of the trip that you listed for and a confirmation number. However, this confirmation email only allows you to be issued a “security document” which looks like a boarding pass but is solely a document to allow you into security.
The first day I started using these benefits I thought they were great. I flew to Nashville, then Denver then ended up home in Seattle for a few hours before having to make the trip back to Dallas. This whole trip was spontaneous and everything was listed on the go. I just planned to go on a short trip to Nashville to understand how non-revenue flights work and get used to the process, everything else I did was just listing these flights at the airport itself based on the flights that were leaving at the given times and which ones had space. I got to Seattle smoothly, even though I had been flying for over 8 hours. When trying to get back was when I understood the truth of non-reving. It’s not always smooth. I had listed myself for a trip early Sunday morning that would first go to Denver, then from Denver I would have to catch another flight to Dallas. After getting to Denver, I went up to the gate for the Dallas flight and it was overbooked. I was puzzled and angry, how could it be overbooked if I had just checked to see if there were seats.
Apparently, there was a weather issue that caused these overbookings and even the flights after that flight were all full. I browsed many different routes back to Dallas to see if there was any way I could make it back that evening. I even considered going to California and then flying back from there Monday morning but then realized those flights will make it to Dallas late because of the time difference. This was also going to be my second week of work so I was worried about what my manager would think if I was late just on the second Monday of work. I was stressed, angry and confused. I even looked up airline tickets that I may be able to purchase just so I could get back that night but there was nothing.
I went and talked to the gate agent and they said the best option was just to stay on the standby list for the 9 pm flight from Denver to Dallas that night. I knew I was most likely not going to get that flight because it was completely booked and there were 11 people listed before me. I asked the gate agent if I could just be switched over to the standby list for the morning flight because then I would have been one of the first ones listed for that and would have had more of a chance of getting that flight. The gate attendant told me he couldn’t switch my name over to the next flight until this one left and just to wait. I sighed, and decided to take control of the situation. I sat by the gate and started typing an email out to my manager explaining the situation and how I might be late to work on Monday. I didn’t want to sound too desperate but at the same time didn’t want to sound terse. I was stuck in this cycle of editing and retyping when I started hearing standby names.
I heard one name and then a pause. I looked up briefly for a moment too see if that person was around and went up to claim their boarding pass…no one showed up. I didn’t think too much of it, obviously in the ten-people listed after that person one would definitely be around. Each name was called one after another but no one was showing up. After about the 6thname I was shocked. Maybe my name would actually be called. After the 6thname the names seemed to be called faster and faster. When my name was called I bolted to the ticket counter and the gate agent that told me to wait laughed as he handed me a boarding pass. I thanked him several times and rushed onto the flight and made it back to Dallas around 12 am on Monday. I was really lucky, I somehow got out of Denver and made it back before the next morning. Little did I know that this situation was a once in a lifetime one. Or at least once in a lifetime during the course of the internship.
One of the most difficult standby experiences I had was when I went to Boston for a weekend to visit a friend. I got to Boston just fine with a direct flight that reached in the afternoon. I met up with my friend and she showed me around downtown Boston. The city seemed to have a colonial feel to it, old but sophisticated at the same time. We walked around all day and then decided to go back. I stayed over at her place that night and had a flight the next afternoon around 1 pm. When I looked at the flight the night before, it had 30 seats available and I wasn’t worried about whether or not I would get the flight. We went out to breakfast then I Ubered over to the airport and got through security and went to get a ticket for this flight. It was overbooked. I was shocked.
How did a flight with 30 seats overbook? It was unreal, but the only option I had was to wait and be rolled over to the next flight in a couple hours. That flight was also fully booked but I decided to take the chance because you never know with flights. I waited in the airport and but didn’t get the next flight as well, there were no other flights to Dallas that night and the only chance I had to get back in the morning was to somehow get out of Boston on any flight that night then take a flight to Dallas in the morning. All the flights out of Boston were fully booked as well so it was difficult to even get a flight out of the area. I somehow managed to get a flight to Indiana which would reach the airport late at night and from there, there was a flight to Dallas at 6 am. I figured this was my best bet since this was the only way to get out of Boston and I probably had a better chance of getting a flight from Indiana as opposed to Boston early in the morning.
I took the flight to Indiana and then in Indiana looked to see if there were any other flights that night to anywhere else that might have more open flights in the morning. However, there were no other flights that night so my best bet was waiting for the morning flight. The morning flight didn’t have any seats on it but I was the first on the waiting list and it was an early morning flight which at least a couple people don’t show up to. I was debating getting a hotel but figured it’d take too much time going out then just coming back in a few hours so I decided to spend the next few hours in the airport. Those hours were the most difficult hours to get through. I talked to a couple of friends on the phone to pass time, at about 3 am I was really sleepy and took a short nap for a half hour but was immediately woken up to airport cleaners, vacuum noises and so forth. I then decided to get some coffee around 4 and just wait for a couple more hours.
People started rolling into the airport around 4:30 for all the morning flights and the empty area became a busting hub. I went to the gate I was supposed to sit at and went and asked the gate agent if there were seats available on the Dallas flight, she said it did have seats but to wait until it was fully boarded and then she would call the names on the standby list. I sat and waited for everyone to board and then patiently waited for the name announcements. The gate agent finally picked up the radio and I was about to get up when I heard “the flight to Dallas is full, we don’t have space for standby at this time.” WHAT. I was overwhelmed with anger and extreme exhaustion from sleep deprivation. How was I going to get back in time?
I asked the gate agent again and she said there really were no seats and my best bet was to be listed for the next flight. I looked at the next flight and it had over 30 people on the waitlist, there was no way I was going to sit around for that, and I also knew for a fact there was no way I was going to make it to work at 9. I sent an email explaining the situation to my team and the manager about how I was stuck in the airport and may need to take a few more flights to get out and I wasn’t sure if I would make it to work. Luckily, my manager was very understanding and supportive during this situation so that helped.
I looked for flights to just get out of Indiana and a flight to Florida had some open space so I waited a couple hours to get there. From Florida, I took a flight that stopped in St. Louis but then ultimately got back to Dallas at 5 pm on Monday. Right when I got back I slept
Overall, what I’ve learned from non-revenue travel is patience and planning ahead sometimes get you nowhere. Getting to places on a space available basis takes
A few takeaways from working at Southwest:
The environment and attitudes of people in the workplace makes a big difference in whether or not people want to stay in the company long term. It also makes a difference in terms of motivation to do the actual work. When a company culture is light hearted but the people are hardworking and caring in the workplace it shows that a company has potential to grow and will stay strong.
In a way, starting late forced me to really learn how everything works by myself. I had guidance from my manager, but with the majority of work I dove straight in and had to learn on the go. I learned how to become a self-starter and really define any problems or needs I had then go about finding the right people to help guide me through them. People were always so open and willing to help. At first, I didn’t know what people would think if I asked them questions that might have been very obvious to them and was hesitant but then realized that people want to help no matter what.
In terms of project and things, everything was open ended, I drove how much work I could take on and what I wanted to work on. I know this is not always the case in many jobs but this internship really gave me the opportunity to define what I wanted to work on and set deadlines for myself. This was a huge contrast from school where everything was defined, I analyzed things I thought needed analysis and made my case for why I was doing what I was doing. I learned how to be proactive in terms of work and really understand and explore my areas of interest and passion.
Getting to know people in a huge company is difficult. There are so many people and you really have to go out of your way and step out of the daily routine and actively make conversation with people in hallways to get to know them. Most of the time people are very responsive, friendly and inclusive and actually want to be friends with you. You also have to go to company events and actively network so that you get to know a wider variety of people.
There are many events and small projects I kept getting emails about. Really prioritizing what I needed to do was key. I had to figure out my top priorities in the day according to what my manager assigned me and based on that figure out what else I could take on during the day. People in other teams would ask me to help out with events and small tasks because they usually believed that as an intern I wouldn’t have much work. However, sometimes I had to turn down these tasks if I had other work to do, and sometimes I found that taking on these tasks gave me less time to work on the bigger projects that I was working on so I really had to strategize with some of these things.
Communication is key. There were times I had to leave the office early to run an errand or days I couldn’t make it in due to illness or getting stuck on planes. These things inevitably happen but communicating them to the team and the manager and emphasizing that you are still available via phone or email makes a huge difference.
It’s okay to take a break sometimes. Realistically, some days are going to be more productive than others as our moods and energy levels vary day by day. Really taking that into account when setting deadlines as to when you’ll be able to get something done is crucial. Sometimes I assumed I’d be able to finish a lot more than I actually was able to during a given day. I learned to give myself a little bit of extra time for projects so that I would get them done for sure by the deadline.
Last but not least, never turn down an opportunity. I was hesitating to even accept this offer because there were other things I could have been doing as well. I had a feeling I was losing something else if I took this opportunity, but ultimately life is a series of choices and whatever you choose there will always be an enriching journey ahead, full of ups and downs and many life lessons.