Be Your Future

Six months can be a long time. What was the last thing you waited six months for? Or what was the last thing that crept up on you after you’d known about it six months in advance?

I can safely say that the past 6 months have flown by at a rate I have never experienced before. I was thinking when I realised how close I was to the half-way point of my internship; “Are there any other placements that I could have enjoyed this much?” The answer that I came to really shouldn’t have surprised me, I have done so much, seen so much, and been part of so much that no wonder six months seems to have flown by. Just to put this in some perspective here are some numbers: I’ve sent and received over 4,000 emails, been onsite to see and advise real customers over 50 times, flown on over 30 domestic flights, stayed in 6 different hotels, given presentations on 5 different products, sent out official Microsoft communications 3 times, taken (and passed) 2 Microsoft Office Foundation exams and I’m still only 1/2 of the way through this internship year.

So what can actually happen in six months? For me, the best bit of my internship has been being able to get up in the morning, put on my pass saying ‘Microsoft’, walk into an office, and sit down to do a job that is constantly evolving, in a company that seems to always want to get the best out of you. Without feeling like you’re trying to out run a train or you’ve been left in a corner to ‘get on with it’. Every day seems to be another opportunity to find something out, get something done, or learn something new. The atmosphere is always about moving forward and doing something, which at the start of the year I thought would be a view that would wear off, but it hasn’t. In addition, being placed in the Edinburgh office in Scotland and having the customers that I do means that I get the chance to travel a lot. This has given me the opportunity to learn so many things about; forward planning, contingency planning, and most importantly which of my colleagues laptops have the same charger as mine, for when the one lead you leave at home is the one you need most.

When you can look back through six months of plans, meetings and travel and remember all of it but it still feels great each time you walk through the door to work. I think it’s safe to say the time has flown in the best possible way.

So looking back on six months of work and play I can say without a shadow of a doubt that the only bad thing I can reflect on now, is that the timer to when I have to leave has started counting down.