Sean Marks: My Time at VMware
The first internship that I undertook was a completely virtual experience – I had never been in any professional work setting like this before, but I wanted to talk about some of my experiences and takeaways. I joined VMware as a Procure-to-Pay accounting intern at the beginning of the 2020 summer. It was daunting at first being flooded with emails and messages and reminders and notifications from many people who I had never or met or just recently met. Without a doubt, one of the most important skills that helped me do well was organization and prioritization. While organization is stressed as an extremely important skill, I think that you can’t forget about how vital it is to prioritize your tasks accordingly. Having a variety of pending projects that all differ in timeline, content, and structure really forced me to figure out what was the most essential task at hand that needed to be completed. On top of this, I found that planning challenges ahead of time and creating a safeguard in the event of an unexpected outcome helped to mitigate many headaches and roadblocks. However, the virtual experience did bring about some rather positive consequences. For me, public speaking has never been my strongest suit. The virtual format really helped to eliminate that physical aspect of being right in front of the people that you are presenting to, and I definitely felt much more confident in my in-person public speaking abilities. I am grateful to have been able to participate in an internship during these times, and I hope that everyone currently on their career/internship search not be discouraged and stay strong in their endeavours.