A new environment. A new way of learning. An old strategy, ready to be applied.
As I set up my whiteboard before my first work week began, I thought to myself, "this summer is going to be mine to take, and it is going to be filled with greatness."
You may be asking, what is the whiteboard? In summary, the whiteboard is a physical manifestation of my ideas. Before my internship at Dell began, we received a stipend to set up office space. My first purchase with the stipend was a ticket to Anchorage, AK- more on that later. My second purchase was a 50" wide whiteboard that I shoved into my room.
When I first got to college, I wanted to develop an app. Yes, the proverbial "college kid wants to be like Michael Dell or Bill Gates, and tries to transform the world through an app." Needless to say, it did not work.
Through my failure, I learned many lessons. The most important, being Agile Methodology.
Agile is a framework of project management used to design technology and implement new processes and solutions into old existing structures of tech infrastructure.
With my whiteboard, I designed a framework that helped me manage my vision for this greatness filled summer, which would inevitably lead me to create a cross-functional approach to the most important aspect of this internship: relationship building.
So the question remains: did it work? Yes, it did. The framework moved my vision along, but I truly believe that the reason I succeeded in meeting the people that I did, and developing the relationships that I have was only possible because of one philosophy I maintain: seek to learn, seek to solve.
When approaching conversation, my one purpose was to listen to listen, and not listen to respond. I began conversations with my peers, my managers, Sales Reps., Solutions Principals, Senior Consultants, Vice Presidents, Senior VP's, Presidents, and our Chief Customer Officer and Chief Operating Officers by listening, not because I needed to respond to their experience and positions, but because I cared about everyone's vision for themselves within this great company.
I promise you when I say this, it was all by design. This is the power of the whiteboard.
Here was my Wk. 1 Setup... I am not good at staying in 1 place, so I change locations frequently.