Week 8 Journal

7/24/17

It’s quite baffling that we are already on week 8. This internship has been flying by. However, today was a great start to the week. Today, however, didn’t consist of many projects at all. When I got into the office, I saw that Christine emailed Roz, letting her know to do an updated WC Reserve Analysis with me sitting with her, so I could see and learn how to do it. I knew Roz wasn’t into the office yet, so I decide to do some ELearns. I’m proud to say, I’m officially done with all of my ELearns. That was such a huge relief because there were so much of them. After I finished, I went upstairs to tell Roz that I can sit with her any time today other than from 10:30 to lunch. She thought that was fine, and seemed to want to do it after lunch. At 10:30, we were going to have a conference call to talk about our sales challenge, so Jean, Brian and I went over a few things beforehand. The call was fine, and we found out that we were going to have a pre-sales challenge run on Thursday. After the call, I had another call with Rodney Johnson, the area vice president of our Cincinnati branch. Scott Firestone advised me to connect with him and get to know him and learn from him and I definitely did. It was really nice talking to him and I will be sure to keep in contact with him. After lunch, Roz told me to come up at 3:30, so I took all of this time to go over the sales challenge more, picking a company, and brainstorming some ideas of what we can do and how we could set it up. At 3:30, I went up to Roz and she showed me how to do everything. What I thought was extremely cool was the fact that they used all of the data I made with the loss triangle report that I did last week. If there is one thing that I have been enjoying to the max during this internship, is doing things that are of real importance that everyone uses. I feel really a part of the process and it is really cool. That basically ended the day, and a good day it was.

7/25/17

Today was a day spent doing a lot of preparations for the sales challenge coming up. Brian, Jean and I took a lot of the time brainstorming on more things that would work well with our pitch. We looked up current fast food clients and found some good things to use for the challenge. Today we also wrote some certain facts that we made for the client so that the judges can have a feel for what’s going on as well as take on the role of the company. One thing that was neat, was Matt giving us a contact to connect with who will help a lot in preparing us and giving us an idea of what things to expect, but also some things to say and ask. This will be a big help because since the challenge must last about 15 minutes. Also, earlier today Christina also had me do a few things on excel deleting rows and highlighting duplicates. Hopefully, tomorrow our contact will be able to talk, so we are looking forward to that. Today was a good day, though. Hopefully, tomorrow we can get even further ahead with our sales challenge.

7/26/17

I came to work today seeing a reply from Joseph Pinto, the guy that Matt told us to reach out to. He let us know that he can talk with us today at 1:00. That was really cool of him to take time out of his day to talk to us. A project that came out of know where actually came from an underwriter. An underwriter emailed me in reply to an email I sent him over a week ago about a quote. He said he needed me to fill in the square foot for certain buildings and apply the years built as well. He also wanted me to send him the loss runs for our client. I thought that was cool to do because I was in direct contact with the underwriter helping out our client. Later we had our talk with Joseph and it was really nice learning a lot about the restaurant niche and the things that we do for our clients. He helped a lot with our sales challenge. We created the summary for our sales challenge later and just fine tune some things that we will go over. So far, we have everything that we are going to talk about, however, we haven’t assigned who is going say what yet. Tomorrow, we have that prep presentation with the intern coordinators.

7/27/2017

So today started off with quite the surprise. We went in to our prep presentation, thinking that this is something to have an overview of everything that we will be saying with questions coming from both sided, but apparently we were supposed to actually present to them. The communication wasn’t as good as it should have been, but we played a part in that. The coordinators seemed to not be too mad about it, and we schedule our presentation for tomorrow. However we still did what we thought today was going to be and it was really helpful. We asked them for some advice going in, and they asked us questions that they feel like will be asked during the real presentation. Some questions we understood, and some questions we didn’t, but now we have answers to them and tomorrow should go well. Project wise, I did a few things. I submitted a quote to Zurich for Christine, and I helped Amber fill out some information on a client who owns cars. I also filled in some premium information for Roz, but we need the loss runs from our client to finish off our project. I ended the day going over all of the things that we need to do for the presentation tomorrow. Overall it was a really good day.

7/28/2017

Today was a great day. Today was the day that my group and I had to do our presentation again since things turned out different yesterday. All morning, Jean, Brian, and I practice and prepared ourselves for the presentation. It is only with Giancarlo and Megan, so I feel quite calm about the approach. At 11:30 John Cookman took me, along with a few other interns out to lunch. I could say that he solidified my decision to try and become a producer in my future. Even though what we talked about wasn’t him pitching how why we should be producers, the stories that he told, good and bad, the relationships that he built, good and bad, and the clients that he got, good and bad, were so nice to hear about and is something that I would love to have something similar to in my career. I will be doing the best I can to become a producer. The presentation after lunch was phenomenal, the feedback they gave us was great and I thought we did very well. Today was a great day and I’m looking forward to the sales challenge next week.