I am a student in Professor Arvan's Econ 490 class, writing under an alias to protect my privacy, using the name of a professional economist as part of the alias.

Sunday, November 27, 2016

Reputations

One of the reputations that I believe that I have across all domains in my life is that I am someone that is always willing to help. With my family and friends, I am known as someone that they can always come to if they need help finishing a task, need advise or just want someone to listen. I always try to put others, especially my loved ones, before myself, and it is something that I take pride in. The domain that I would like to focus more closely on, though, is the reputation I had at the place that I interned this summer, which is that I’m a person always willing to help. I try to achieve this reputation at every place that I work.

As anyone who has read my past blog posts knows, I worked for a pharmaceutical product manufacturer and distributor this past summer in the Chicago suburbs and I will be returning there full-time upon my graduation. Before talking about my reputation within this internship that I believe secured myself a full-time offer, I would like to take a step back and briefly discuss why I was able to receive an interview and internship offer in the first place. I think that by already having past internship and work experience on my resume as a junior really helped in receiving an interview with Medline as well as other companies. I think that this showed my willingness to work and my initiative that I was later able to portray in my interview and throughout my internship.

On the first day of my internship, I spent most of my day in presentations about the company and internship experience with the other forty interns. One thing that was told to us during one of the presentations was that they had room for all of us to get full-time offers as long as we proved that we were deserving of the position. The sort of things that the recruiter said that the company typically looks for in a full-time hire is that they are motivated, work hard and take initiative, all things that I believed I had exemplified in my past jobs.

From there, I jumped right into my internship. I was placed in a division with people that I instantly connected with and felt comfortable around. Becoming this comfortable with my coworkers allowed me to ask a lot of questions to learn as much about the product and company as possible. I also became comfortable asking for work whenever I felt like I had time to, and it also lead my coworkers to ask me to do extra tasks for them if I had the opportunity. Knowing that at the end of the summer I would be eligible to receive an offer from the company and that in order to do so I would have to prove myself deserving in ten short weeks, I wanted to take full advantage of every opportunity given to me and make the most out of every day that I was there.

I seemingly instantly became known within my division as someone who was willing to help with tasks, even if they weren’t related to my projects that I was assigned to by my manager on my first day. I’m sure this is how many interns are perceived, it is one of the main reasons companies have interns in the first place. However, I think beyond that my division knew that I genuinely liked helping out when I could. I was able to learn various different aspects of the division beyond the marketing side that I was hired on for.


At times, I would say that I have strayed from this reputation of always taking on other tasks. I took a business ethics class the semester before my internship, and one of the topics that my professor went over is setting personal boundaries when it comes to work. He mentioned that for many people, myself included, it’s hard to say no to someone when they ask for your help, but it’s important for work not to completely take over your life. I think this pertains more to a full-time career when you are on salary, but I found it being applicable during my internship as well. As an intern, we were supposed to try our best to get our work done in a forty-hour time limit and we weren’t supposed to work overtime. With this restriction, I had to learn to prioritize my work and make sure that I wasn’t committing to too many projects that I wouldn’t be able to complete.

5 comments:

  1. The way you describe things, I can see some relationship between your performance in my class and what you describe as your willingness to help in other environments, family and work. You typically get your posts done early and and the Excel homework too, although once or twice there was departure from that pattern. But in the main, I can see what you describe in our work outside the class.

    I wonder, however, about a different aspect of work, call it creativity or ingenuity or simply being playful and trying something out of the ordinary. First, during the internship was there any mention about that sort of thing as something desired? Second, is that something that motivates you at all?

    There are certain professions that one thinks of as especially emphasizing helping others. Healthcare (a doctor or a nurse for example) is one area. Becoming a teacher is another. I am not sure of the work that Medline does and maybe it is true that being helpful can happen in any profession. (Indeed, our notion of gift exchange might fit with that.) But even as I've emphasized that in class, I continue to believe that ingenuity is valued in the workplace and want to encourage students to practice that where they can.

    Sometimes, even if our reputation is in one area, we put in a fair amount of effort in another area. That's one way to keep our options open.

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    1. I'm not quite sure if this quite answers your first question, but creativity was something that was certainly something that was promoted within our internship program and the rest of the employees with our company. Especially when it came to the marketing side that I was directly a part of, I was constantly given responsibilities to create marketing pieces without much guidance so that I could try to show my own creative nature. This is something that I really enjoyed about my internship since I felt like I was doing something that would actual be useful, which isn't always the case with tasks given to interns. I think that by giving me such responsibility, the company was able to get, in a way, an "outside" perspective since I was new to the company and hadn't been surrounded by previously created marketing pieces. It really motivated me to do my best work, since it was really all on me, and also try to go beyond and make different versions of a piece in hopes that one would work for the company.

      I would agree that professions such as a doctor, nurse or teacher are those that are typically associated with helping people. For myself personally, I thought about pursuing a career such as a doctor or psychologist but science has never been my strongest subject. In terms of the gift exchange, as you mentioned, I also believe is a way to help others even if you don't necessarily make it the main focus and goal of your profession. Ingenuity is something that I think is stressed in companies now more than ever especially with the advancement of technology. The word "innovation" is tossed around the office all the time as something that the company is striving to achieve.

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  2. Congratulations on doing so well! Do you think there's a "feedback loop" effect between your reputation and your behavior? If you value your reputation, you might work even harder than you would have otherwise in order to keep it. This, in turn, will lead to you having even more of a reputation to maintain that you will work even harder to keep. As you said in the last paragraph, maintaining your reputation in the long term will likely lead you to greater career success, but it can also make your life more stressful and take away time from other things.

    One thing you could possibly do to "cash in" on your reputation would be to work extremely hard to earn a high-powered and highly paid position in your company, but then abandon your reputation and become significantly less helpful than before. You could likely slow down your work while still working enough to keep your job. From what I have seen, this happens fairly often in the corporate world, and might even be one of the driving forces behind the "everyone is promoted to their level of incompetence" phenomenon. As one's rank in a company increases, not only is more expected of them, but as they become more satisfied with their position their motivation to go above and beyond in their work decreases.

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  3. Being in your group, you definitely are some one who is willing to help and to get the task complete. You have always been on top of deadlines and pushing our group members to get the work done in a timely fashion.

    In the work place, I could see how you would be willing to take to much work on your hands in short amount of time. Sometimes it might be better to do less work but with more quality then it is to do quantity with less quality.

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  4. Wow congratulations on your full-time job offer I definitely see that you really value your reputation and won't let anything come between you and achieving your goals. Based on your past blog posts and being in your group for the project I definitely see that you are a hard worker that doesn't like to procrastinate when it comes to getting work done. I feel like the way you are going you will never lose the respect you gain!

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