Stepping Outside the Comfort Zone

My name is Anna Grillo and I am currently interning at Xercel, a company that helps redesign websites and improve brands’ social media.  Going into my first internship, I was expecting that my work was going to be very similarly structured like it was in a classroom.  I thought I was going to have one assignment at a time, work on it, move on to the next assignment, then repeat.  However, I quickly realized that was not the case in the real world.

Some days at the office I would be assigned multiple projects to be worked on whenever I got the chance, being in charge of my own time management.  My work could go to from writing, to research, to all on my own, to working with other people in the office.  I had always focused mainly on copywriting when in class or in a group project, but being at my internship has given me the chance to work on projects outside of my comfort zone.  Before being assigned work that I normally what not have taken on in class or group projects, I thought that I probably would not have been able to do it.  Now that I have worked on other parts of advertising, mostly with research and content planning, I feel confident in more than one part of advertising.

Working at my internship has really expanded my knowledge of what it is like to work in an office and not just on class work.  It has also made me feel a lot more confident about getting a job after I graduate in the spring.  I have always worried that I would not be able to adjust from school work to office work but this experience has really shown me that, although the work can be very different, the work in class has really prepared me.  I am also excited that I have pushed myself outside of my comfort zone of what I know and hope that I will get to do that more often in the future as well.