Internship 1st post

Beginning an internship at Octagon has been a very interesting experience. Octagon is a Sports marketing company, with clients such as Home Depot, Michael Phelps, and Apolo Ohno. Personally I work on the Home Depot account and have had the privilege of attending Braves games and Kids Workshops.

On my first day at Octagon, my boss Patrick, walked up to Bola (the other intern) and I and said, “So one of us is going to dress up in the Homer outfit, the Home Depot mascot, and possibly be on Turner Field (the ATL MLB Stadium) during the tool race.” I immediately raised my hand and exclaimed, “I’ll do it!” I am extremely qualified for the job, seeing that I was the president of the spirit club in high school. I was so excited. I GOT TO GO ON THE FIELD IN THE MIDDLE OF A BRAVES GAME! I couldn’t help but think that this was the best first day of work that could possible ever happen. (Come to find out I would sweat my ass off and end up getting hit in the face with a battery pack and a fan… simultaneously.) Before the game started, we helped kids build helicopters, which is part of a program that Home Depot does called Kids Workshop. I really enjoyed the experience, because we got to go behind the scenes at Turner Field and see the corporation behind the games, and because I love kids, and we got to help the build something that they normally would not have been able to do.

After the initial day of excitement, the experience wound down a bit. Myself and the other intern were given the summer long task of updating the Competitive Report. This is a report that is 100 slides long on Power Point. It is my job to update all of the Home Depot sporting event contracts on the report and it is also my job to update every single one of Home Depot’s competitors sport contracts i.e. Lowe’s, Scott’s, K-mart, etc. We also have to update a Sponsorship Overview booklet that physically holds all of the contracts Home Depot has and write a brief summary about each one.

Doing this internship has been a huge help with my professional communication because I have had to learn how to communicate with the business community in a different way than I’ve ever had to communicate before. I am also trying to take on a leadership role between myself and the other intern. He knows less about the professional world than even I do, and I have been sure to try and take the reigns when it comes to the larger summer projects.

One communication issue that I have stumbled upon in the company is that their IT people are terrible. It is our fourth week into the internship and we still do not have printing capabilities, and we cannot complete some tasks because we need to load stamps.com and print mass amounts of postage. However in order to load anything on the computer you need an administrative password that NOBODY in the company can seem to give us. It’s getting ridiculous and quite frustrating.

I have also become a fulfillment expert. Entering data, packing 500 items, and shipping them is no easy task.