My Summer Intern Blog!

Hello to my many blog readers! My name is Elise Zaniker. This summer, I worked as the Editorial Intern for Perceivant. As an engineering student at Purdue, this certainly wasn’t the typical internship one would expect an engineer to have, but expanding your horizons to figure out what you want to do with your life is what summer internships are all about.

Throughout the summer, the interns were busy with both work and many super secret intern projects. The intern projects started off strong with our proposal for a monthly pizza day designed to get the whole office to come together over the one thing that unifies everyone, free food. My personal favorite of the intern projects was the creation of a personality quiz designed to determine which Perceivant employee everyone was most like. Because we had only been working at the company for around a month when the quiz was created, the quiz was not entirely accurate. 4 of the 12 employees who took the quiz got the “Congrats! You got Elise” result. I haven’t determined if I should take this as a compliment or as a sign that I have very basic personality traits. These intern projects allowed us to bring some fun into the office and to allow us to develop relationships with our new co-workers in a limited time span.

I have really enjoyed the flexibility this internship provided me with. Being able to work from home allowed me to have more control over my schedule. This flexibility also required me to overcome some challenges, such as staying self-motivated, not procrastinating, and trying to get work done while my 60 pound dog tries to unexpectedly jump into my lap to be pet even though I am in the middle of working on something. Having the freedom to control my schedule has helped me to further strengthen my time management skills. Throughout this internship, I have worked on a variety of different tasks for a variety of different subjects. During this internship I have created psychology powerpoints, written sociology questions, and created guided learnings for FitQuest. Being able to work on different subjects allowed me to learn about new topics throughout the summer and having different, shorter tasks helped to avoid monotony.

Throughout this internship, I was given a significant amount of autonomy when completing tasks. Once the task was explained to me I was largely free to figure out the minutiae of how to get the task done and was free to finish my work without having to check in every step of the way. This can be intimidating at first, but I quickly learned that lack of micro-management does not equate to lack of support. I found out that through Google searches and bugging your fellow interns to help there are very few problems that you cannot solve. The independence that my fellow interns and I were given allowed me to figure out a working style that worked for me. Some days my ideal work environment was diagnosing Chyna and Ethan with the psychological disorders I was reading about while writing questions for the Psychology course and some days my ideal work environment was putting in headphones and listening to podcasts so that I could tone out Chyna explaining her latest million-dollar idea, such as burrito tape or removable sleeves. This freedom helped me to further understand my ideal work environment and what I need to do to accomplish my tasks efficiently.

Now that the summer is over, I am excited to head back to Purdue for my Junior year. My experiences from this summer will stay with me both symbolically and literally, seeing as Ethan is living a few blocks down from me and Chyna is my roommate. I had a great experience at my internship and am very grateful to everyone at Perceivant for giving me the opportunity to join their team for the summer.