Boy this summer flew by quickly! CC Pace’s summer intern, Niels, enjoyed his last day here in the CC Pace office on Friday, August 18th. Niels made the rounds, said his final farewells, and then he was off, all set to return to The University of Maryland, Baltimore County, for his last hurrah. Niels is entering his senior year at UMBC, and we here at CC Pace wish him all the best. We will miss him.
Niels left a solid impression in a short amount of time here at CC Pace. In a matter of 10 weeks, Niels interacted with and was able to enhance several internal processes for virtually all of CC Pace’s internal departments including Staffing, Recruiting, IT, Accounting and Financial Services (AFA), Sales and Marketing. On his last day, I walked Niels around the office and as he was thanked by many of the individuals he worked with, there were even a few hugs thrown around. Many folks also expressed wishes that Niels’ and our paths will hopefully soon cross again. In short, Niels made a very solid impression on a large group of my colleagues in a relatively short amount of time.
Back in June I gladly accepted the challenge of filling Niels’ ‘mentor’ role as he embarked on his internship. I’d like to think I did an admirable job, which I hope Niels will prove many times over in the years to come as he advances his way up the corporate ladder. As our summer internship program came to a close, I couldn’t help reminiscing back to my days as a corporate intern more than 20 years ago. Our situations were similar; I also interned during the spring/summer semesters of my junior year at Penn State University, with the assurance of knowing I had one more year of college remaining before I entered the ‘real world’. My internship was only a taste of the ‘corporate world’ and what was in store for me, and I still had one more year to learn and figure things out (and of course, one more year of fun in the Penn State football student section – priorities, priorities…)
Penn State’s Business School has a fantastic internship program, and I was very fortunate to obtain an internship at General Electric’s (GE) Corporate Telecommunications office in Princeton, NJ. My role as an intern at GE was providing support to the senior staff in the design and implementation of voice, data and video-conferencing services for GE businesses worldwide. Needless to say, this was both a challenging and rewarding experience for a 21-year-old college student, participating in the implementation of GE’s groundbreaking Global Telecommunications Network during the early years of the internet, among other things.
As I reminisced back to my eight months at GE, I couldn’t help but notice the similarities between my internship and a few of the ‘lessons learned’ I took away from my experience 20+ years ago, and how they compared or contrasted to my recent observations and feedback I provided to Niels as his mentor. Of course, there are pronounced differences – after all, many things have changed in the last 20 years – the technology we use every day is clearly the biggest distinction. I would be remiss not to also mention the obvious generation gap – I am a proud ‘Gen X’er’, raised on Atari and MTV, while Niels is a proud Millennial, raised on the Internet and smartphones. We actually had a lot of fun joking about the whole ‘generation gap thing’ and I’m sure we both learned a lot about each other’s demographic group. Niels wasn’t the only person who learned something new over the summer – I learned quite a bit myself.
In summary, my reminiscing back to the late 90’s certainly helped make my daily music choices easier for a few weeks this summer led to the vision for this blog post. I thought it would be interesting to list a few notable experiences and lessons I learned as an intern at GE, 20 odd years ago, along with how my experiences compared or contrasted with what I observed in the last 10 weeks working side-by-side with our intern, Niels. These observations are based on my role as his mentor, and were provided as feedback to Niels in his summary review, and they are in no particular order.
Have you similarly had the opportunity to engage in both roles within the intern/mentor relationship as I have? Maybe your example isn’t separated by 20 years, but several years? Perhaps you’ve only had the chance to fulfill one of these roles in your career and would love the opportunity to experience the other? In any case, see if you recognize some of the lessons you may have learned in the past and how they present themselves today. I think you’ll be amazed at how even though ‘the more things change, the more they stay the same’.