Week 9 Journal

7/31/2017

Today starts the last week of our internship. I feel like it went so fast. However, we still have a full week to go through, and today was an eventful day. Today many interns came to our office to prepare for the intern sales challenge tomorrow, and also to sit in some presentations by a few leaders in our industry. It was a very nice learning experience hearing from Maria and Norbert talking about their path and what got them there. There were quite a few presentations, but one I’ll mention is the DISC presentation. It basically tells you what type of person you are. I turned out to be a C, which stood for calculator. I am someone who is always asking questions and use what I know to my advantage. The name given to the calculator was “The Expert.” I thought that name was fitting. Later after work, we had an event networking with other interns and Gallagher employees at the Hilton hotel. It was really nice talking and getting to know everyone. Today was a great day.

8/01/2017

Today is the big day. Today is the day of the Western Regional Sales Challenge. If I’m not going to lie, I was pretty nervous all throughout this thing. My biggest fear was getting eliminated in the first round. On my team were Jean and Brian. A fun fact about our team was that we were the only team that had all first year interns. I’d like to think that that means we were the underdogs. However, even with everything going on, I felt very confident about our abilities as a team. We all knew our stuff and would always help each other if one got caught up in what they were saying. Honestly, we felt like our biggest roadblock to get to the championship was the first round. In the first round we were going up against Riley, Leah, and Jacob. That was a pretty stacked team, but still, we thought we had a good chance. Our first round was honestly, really good. We did very good talking and speaking about our company, but also involving the judges. It was really nice. It was really nerve racking waiting for the other group to finish because it felt so long. When they invited us back in, I saw Leah smiling, so I thought that meant they were going to win. After they talked about how good we both were, they ended up moving us on to the next round. I was so excited about that. It felt so good to not get eliminated so early. In the next round we went up against Taylor, Garret, and Molly. This round, in my opinion, was our worst round. We weren’t absolutely terrible, but we were nowhere near how good we were in the first round. That got me extremely nervous. However, the feedback given from the judges and John Cookman was phenomenal. They told us things that we could’ve done that mad a lot of sense and we were hoping that we could move on to the last round and us what we learned. After Taylor’s group went, they invited us back in. The biggest difference to the judges was that one group was able to pivot very well, and that group was us. So they moved our group to the Championship. The excitement was through the roof. After winning the 2nd round, my nervousness went down a lot and we were ready for the championship. Seeing how many people were in the Los Angeles room was insane, and then knowing that the judges are in such a high position in the company, the nerves started to kick in. We went second in the championship, and if I’m going to be honest, I thought we did fantastic. All of the nerves went away when we started talking and I feel like we felt comfortable as a team. It was a really nice performance, so I was really hoping that we won. Unfortunately, when the judges came in with their decision, we ended up with 2nd place. It was all still a lot of fun, and I feel like I learned a lot getting so much experience doing this. Learning from each judge as we moved on was so helpful seeing what we could’ve done different, but also knowing what we did that was great. I had a really fun day today and thought that the sales challenge was a perfect way to show what we have learned this summer.

8/02/2017

Today, I didn’t have anything scheduled today, so today I was helping out the people on my team. When I looked at my email, I saw that Jason had a project for me making a binder to send to our clients. Apparently, they didn’t want us to send it to them as a pdf, so we printed out copies and put them in a binder. That was easy enough. After that I decided to do my journals for Monday and Tuesday because I didn’t want to get behind. For lunch, a few interns and I went to lunch. This was the first time I’ve went to lunch in weeks. The place that we went to took way too long to give us our food, so we had to get it to go. After I ate my lunch at work, I went to Amber to get a project and she had me put in the payroll of a client, and show the difference in premium that they are going to have to pay in relation to last year’s premium. However, before I finished that, I got an email from Kevin Cipoletti. He was one of the judges of the championship yesterday. He reached out to me to let me know how well I did in the championship. It was really nice of him to take time out of his day to do this. I was very thankful, and that’s what I told him in response along with some other things. Later Nick came in to say goodbye because he will be going on vacation so we won’t see him on our last day. It was really nice how he talked to us and complimented how we did this summer and giving us more advice as well as letting us know that he will be there for us if we ever need him. After that I finished Amber’s project. There wasn’t much time left until we could go, so I spent the rest of the time hanging with the interns in the other room. Matt came in talking about what will go on tomorrow with the performance review, along with other stuff. Today was a great day and I’m excited for my review tomorrow.

8/03/2017

I’ve never had a job before this, so I’ve never had a performance review before. I know that I’ve been a great person to work with because everyone that talks to me tells me so, but I can’t say that I wasn’t nervous at all going into it. There is always the “what if” everything didn’t turn out to be what I expected. However, thankfully I got an extremely good review. Corey, Matt, and Leslie said that everyone loved me and that no one had anything bad to say about me, and I loved that. The only criticism that was mentioned was that I should work on knowing the difference between a business and a casual meeting. I would guess that is because I get comfortable with people too easily, but that is an easy fix in this situation. I was glad to know that all of my hard work has paid off in leaving a mark with my internship. I really have been trying my best and it is always great to be recognized for it. Later we all went to lunch together and it was a lot of fun. It was the last lunch that we will have together for this internship, and it was nice. When we got back from lunch, there was an intern webinar that I listened to in the other room. Later I felt like doing my journal for the day so that’s what I did. It was a great second to last day.

8/04/2017

Today is our last day!! To sum up what I did today; I wrote a bunch of journals and had a bunch of good byes. This internship was so special and I can’t express how much I enjoyed every bit of it. Thank you guys so much!!!