I've learned to appreciate the gracious teachers I have in school because as an intern your main job is to please your boss by doing exactly what you're told in a timely manner. At school there's plenty of room for mistakes as long as you learn from said mistakes. Out in the working world it's kind of like baseball: three strikes and you're out.
The people I've been working with this month have amazing focus and spend a mind boggling amount of hours working to get their jobs done. I want to develop those same skills in order to create a successful path for myself. Who doesn't want to develop sharp focus and the ability to work hard and be successful? Sign me up please. I've always known that high school was just a stepping stone in this great big world so I've been pretty focused on preparing myself for greater responsibilities and challenges in the future. This internship made me realize how much I needed my parents and my dogs around me, because being on your own and constantly working is a complete life change. One minute you're being nurtured by your loving parents, and the next someone drops you in Siberia and expects you to flourish like the flower you are! I've realized that maybe I don't want to go to school where it snows, and that is a huge development in my book. I thought that I wanted to go to Law school and maybe I still do. But this internship has helped me realize that I might want a more fast paced and interesting life. I'm not saying that pension law is mind numbing (which it totally is) I'm just saying that it might not be what I want to do for the rest of my life. At work there weren't too many people around, just Deborah and Tim. So the working environment was friendly while still maintaining a professional atmosphere. We communicated how most humans communicate, we used words to form sentences and then used those sentences to articulate our feelings. At my office I wasn't spoken down to which occasionally happens at school. I was viewed as an adult and prompted to act as such, there was no teacher to pat my back and tell me what a great job I was doing. Overall, the world is very different outside of the cocoons that we're in until we sprout into butterflies and go off to college. If you're old enough to live without your parents and go to college you're old enough to act like an adult.
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I took part in meetings and completed projects for my mentor which included pension plan notices for employees of certain companies and I showed my mentor how to uphold a website for his business. I've learned how to take direction and that when things need to get completed on time there is a sense of urgency for that project. Scholastically my internship provided me with the opportunity to articulate project plans and the opportunity to conduct myself in a professional setting. I've had a really pleasant time helping my mentor and his partner complete tasks for their business, and I've come to realize that it takes a village to be successful. Without the help of every person projects would be completed much slower than usual. My project focused on a template for my mentor to use to inform employees of certain companies of their pension plan changes. After many drafts, and many confusing explanations of what was required the template was complete. I've learned exactly what I DON'T want to do in the future. The projects that I worked on didn't interest me as much as I thought they would which surprised me, because I was sure that pursuing a career in law would be interesting and fulfilling. Although I'm still unsure of what it is I want to pursue a career in, my internship has given me perspective on my desires and goals.
Based on today's blog prompt I've come to realize that my internship is basically the same thing as school, without as much homework. So everything that my mentor has been doing is pretty much the same thing as what my teachers have always done. And I'm not using this time to protest against homework, just the opposite actually. I think the commonalities and difference between internship and school should be left alone. Some things are the same for a reason but the differences between the two (at least in my case) shouldn't be rectified. The differences between school and internship are what make them interesting. If they were exactly the same we'd all be bored our of our minds.
And based on the second prompt of the day, I don't really need to worry about my academic performance. I brought the exact skills that have made me successful in school to my internship not vise versa. My perspective however has changed. I thought that Law was what I wanted to pursue, now I know it's not. Definitely gained perspective that I otherwise (and without internship) wouldn't have realized. Today I reviewed Makenna Albano's blog, Rebecca Markowitz's blog, and Chloe Evans blog.
While Makenna and Chloe are working at similar internships, Rebecca's internship is entirely tech related. I enjoyed looking at the diversity between the blogs because Chloe had a lot of images on her blog that really let me see what she's been working on. Makenna writes her blog posts in the past and present tense letting readers know what she' working on past, present, and future. Rebecca's could explain a bit more about her projects because it's a difficult concept to grasp but otherwise her blog posts are all extremely stimulating. Well the first thing I notice off the bat is that internship has much longer hours than school, which I was expecting because the average workday is 8-9 hours. For work, I get up 30 minutes before I need to be at the office and eat breakfast, usually for school I'm too busy running around trying to get things done to eat breakfast. There are only two people that I usually run into at the office, Tim Mlsna and Deborah Boling. Other than that the occasional repairman that needs to work for 6 hours just to get the wifi working.
So far internship has helped me realize what I DON'T want to do with my life. Maybe law is for me, maybe it isn't. But I know pension law is not what I want to do. I want to do something interesting that keeps me moving and on my toes, I don't want to be stuck behind a desk all day typing up pension plans or just stuck in an office for that matter. Mostly, who I am at internship perfectly correlates with who I am at school and how I act. Professionally influenced, a mentor or boss at internship is the same exact concept as a teacher at school. Working beneath a boss and doing as you're told is the same thing as being given homework or classwork. Without doing work for your boss your job performance fails and the possibility of getting fired is all too real. Without turning in homework or schoolwork the possibility of failing a class is exponentially high. For the past week I've spent my time in two separate offices. I worked on pension plan notices for employees of certain companies, then edited them after review and submitted them to my mentors partner. I worked on revising a pension plan, but only got 3/4 of the way before the project was paused. My next steps are to build my mentor a web presence, create a spreadsheet/list of all estate plans, number each file, and organize everything for a different firm in Oak Brook. Tomorrow I will also be heading into Downtown Chicago to attend a very important meeting for my mentors firm to observe the interactions and functions of each member of the meeting. Overall, every other day here is a new project to work on or an old project to continue. Once I finish one project it will be replaced by another, a personal project of mine included a trip to Northwestern University today. I really enjoyed the campus and the tour and am considering applying to college there. That's all for today folks, thanks!
On the way into the office everything is covered in snow and ice. The door says TIMOTHY M. MLSNA & ASSOCIATES, LTD. in all white lettering and leads into a hallway towards the reception area. Which is where I am currently stationed. Lately, I've been typing up pension plan notices for employees and fixing errors in certain pension plans. But today I spent my time going downtown to deliver some blueprints, and then going over DELIVERING EFFICIENT, EFFECTIVE, AND STREAMLINED GOVERNMENT TO ILLINOIS TAXPAYERS, which is a 400 page long referendum that I will be forwarding to the Board of Trustees tomorrow morning. So that's what has been going on at my desk. Next is the conference room, which is just a fork in the road between Deborah's (Partner in Law with my mentors) office and my mentor, Timothy M. Mlsna's office. Everything is really messy because we just moved the office two days ago, so there are a lot of boxes stacked around the place. We hope to get those unpacked within the next week. Overall, the office isn't large at all, it's just a place of business. Today I woke up at 8 AM feeling very uneasy about the day. I couldn't find my wallet anywhere which I desperately needed, seeing as it had my only form of identification in it. I got ready to leave and reached the office at 9 AM, where I looked everywhere for my wallet. In my office, in the car, outside. I called Chipotle, where I had been the day before and asked about my wallet. No luck. Relenting to the fact that I could search for my wallet later I started to work on the Pension Plan notices for employees of certain companies. I typed up notices for Keystone Consolidated Industries, Inc. and Engineered Wire Products, Inc., JPS Industries Holdings, Inc., and another notice for Keystone and Wire Products for their Inactive Pension Plan. Below I'll post one of the plans I worked on: These notices are posted in all areas of employment to give employees the right to complain to the IRS about the new pension plans that their company may or may not be putting into place. Around 11 AM a stranger walked into the office with my wallet and told me a patient of his had found it out in the parking lot, the drawbacks to not carrying a purse. Having my wallet returned to my possession put me in a good mood for the rest of the day, and I easily finished all of the pension plan notices by noon.
Around that time I went with my mentor to the new office that he'll be moving into tomorrow and got my next project from his partner, Debra. She gave me a copy of the RETIREMENT PENSION PLAN FOR EMPLOYEES OF JPS INDUSTRIES, INC. which was over 120 pages long. I've been going through it looking for spelling mistakes, spacing mistakes, or anything else that might have been wrong with it since about noon. There were so many mistakes because the pension plan had been a hard copy so Debra had had to scan it through software that wrote it into a word document, which was not as reliable as it could have been. At around 6 PM I'd gotten to page 73 of the pension plan, giving myself plenty to work on for Monday. Overall, I've been very successful with my endeavors today, even starting off the day with a missing wallet. Tomorrow I plan to do some SAT prep and visit a few museums in Chicago. I'm most excited to visit the Museum of Science and Industry, because it's my mother's favorite museum. Today is my first official day with my mentor. Yesterday I spent my time traveling on a 12:30 PM flight that was meant to be an 11:40 AM flight to Chicago, IL. I landed and arrived at baggage claim around 6:00 PM to meet my mentor, Tim Mlsna. We made small talk as I waited for my bags to come into view on the baggage claim carousel. I checked two suitcases for my internship because when I was packing the weather was windy and 11 degrees F in Chicago, so everything in my suitcases consists of sweaters, turtlenecks, and wool socks. The weather has been an average of 36 degrees F for the last two days. Very chilly.
When my alarm started singing the Song of Death at 5:30 AM this morning I gracefully dragged my butt out of bed and began getting dressed. I spent some more time reading The Law by Frederic Bastiat and then met Mr. Mlsna downstairs at 7:15 Am. We jumped in the car and drove for an hour and a half to get to the LaSalle County Courthouse, where I observed Mr. Mlsna try to make some progress on a case he opened in 1995... about a bridge. It has taken him 20 years to try and get a bridge built to an island that he owns that is less than a football field away from the mainland! 20 years spent arguing with people about codes and violations and four elections that have put new people into office who've changed the decisions made by their predecessors. After actually making some progress on the case, my mentor agreed to send his plans for the bridge to the local board so that they could approve them. Who knew that something as elementary as building a bridge could have so many complicated obstacles? When we left the LaSalle County Courthouse we made a quick stop on the way back to Oak Brook to see the contractor Mr. Mlsna had hired to build the bridge years ago. He informed the contractor of the possibility of getting the 20 yearlong project finished and then we were on our way again. Now, I am currently sitting in my mentors office typing up the events that have transpired. On Saturday morning I'll be helping my mentor move offices. He's only moving two blocks away, but there are boxes and boxes of files and paper stacked around the office that I'll be helping move to the new location. I still need to ask my mentor the interview questions that were meant for December 3rd, but because today is technically my site visit I will be asking and posting them later on this week. I'm currently most excited about flying all the way to Chicago, IL and experiencing what it means to live in the cold for my internship. My mentor, Tim Mlsna has been emailing me about what I'll be working on and I am very happy to report that I will be dipping my toes into many hypothetical waters. In preparation for my internship I've been reading Frederic Bastiat's The Law: A Classic Blueprint for a Free Society which was written in the 1800's and translated from French to English. The text is far more advanced than most of the books that I read and the language is extremely eloquent, giving me a new perspective on educational literature.
I am also very excited that my mentor is giving me the chance to help create a website for his firm, MLSNA AND ASSOCIATES. My mentor currently has no web presence, trying to search for his law firm on google seemed to be a futile task. He's never needed a website before because all of his business came from word-of-mouth. This project is something that will help my mentor acquire many more contracts for his firm. I'm most nervous about working for my mentor's colleague, Ed Tiesenga. I know my mentor as a close friend of my father, and I don't want to embarrass him in any way. As Mr. Tiesenga's legislative intern I'll be attending Village of Oak Brook board meetings, working on drone-surveillance related projects, and possibly critiquing the Board of Trustees at his firm. |
Emily EverettI will be spending the very cold month of January in Chicago, IL pursuing a law internship! Stay tuned! |