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An Intern’s Impressions 5: when one brain isn’t enough…

As week five draws to a close, it is time for another blog, which I’m sure by now is the highlight of everyone’s week! I wasn’t set any new tasks in the last 7 days and didn’t have many meetings, so you might wonder how I’ve spent my time. Well, this week, I focussed mainly on two tasks, the Graph Task which I spoke about last week and the Competitors Review Task, which I’ve been slowly working away on throughout my internship.

Towards the end of last week, I had a meeting to talk about the first presentation I had made and what I could do to improve it; the start of this week was implementing these suggestions. If I thought the first presentation looked good, the most recent looks incredible, if I say so myself. The graphs all look professional with fancy titles and even have statistics.

Last week’s meeting helped improve my understanding of what the graphs were actually showing, meaning that this week I could draw out the key information and write more detailed conclusions instead of just, “this treatment had the highest efficacy”.  

However, I was quickly humbled after I got sent another report to turn into a presentation. This was one was even trickier than the first as it involved different treatments at the same time and then some at different times using different methods. It took all of Wednesday to get to grips with this one, but I was not going to be defeated by the data! I have already made some rough versions of the graphs for it, but I still have a lot of work to do before it is a presentable presentation.

I also carried on with the Competitor Review Task, which I was set right at the beginning of my internship. I have already finished the bulk of the research for it in previous weeks so all I had to do was write up what I’d found and turn the many pages of lists of websites and how companies are marketing their products into an actual report that makes sense to more people than just me. This week I focussed on the ‘Big four’ agchem companies with their websites and social media pages. A very different social media style to what I’m used to, that’s for sure.

Thanks to Ros, the company’s Corporate Administrator, and Google Analytics, I found out there is an increase of activity on the website when my blogs get published!! This made my day, as I am so glad that it is not just me who likes these blogs. Although I do tell my entire family to read them so that might be the main driver of the increase.

This week was therefore mostly about cracking on with my existing tasks, which are both very different from each other. This meant I had to keep switching from my graph and data brain to my marketing one. This has definitely kept me on my toes, which is always a good thing.

At the moment next week is looking similar; finalising these tasks, and making sure that they are as good as can be.