4 minute read

Sometimes, your hobbies can be just as important as your skills in the workplace. During my time at Acxiom, I have had D&D come up in conversation with most people that I talk to. This has helped people get to know me and talk about how they are interesting in the game but can never find people to play with. I am the President of the D&D club at Hendrix, so it feel like my duty to get people more interested in the game and make it a possibility for them to have a way to play. So, I have been working on putting together a group of people at Acxiom to play D&D with. I might even make an Acxiom D&D club in the form of a Slack Channel; this club would insist of anyone who wanted to join whether that is Interns or Full-Time workers. With the skills that I am learning about data here at Acxiom, I may even be able to create cool programs to make being the Dungeon Master even easier for me.

Acxiom Internship

This past week at Acxiom work was pretty busy. To start off the week, I approached one of my coworkers to shadow him doing his job for a little bit. This allowed me to see what he was working on and see how he approached different problems that he came into. He also said that it was helpful for him because he had to explain everything he was doing and fully understand it himself. However, the next day I saw my supervisor was in the office so I asked if she needed help with her increased workload. One of my coworkers was gone, and it was the beginning of the month, so my supervisor and I worked on some of the monthly files together. Just doing a few of these files took all of Wednesday and some of Thursday to process, but gave me insight on how we may be able to automate the processes. These intense days, however, caused me to burn out.

Dealing with Burnout

Luckily this was only a four day week because by Thursday afternoon, after I finished all of the tasks my supervisor gave me for the day, I was extremely tired out of nowhere. I tried various things to wake myself up, but nothing was working, so I transitioned to working from home for the remainder of the day. I spent the rest of my time clocked in training myself something new and different. I couldn’t focus no matter what though. Then came Friday; much was the same. I spent the whole day tired and struggling to focus and not getting much work done, but then I got to shadow my coworker again. Sometimes it just takes another person to shake you out of the cycle of burnout. My energy felt restored and I was able to teach myself about the software I will be using in an upcoming project.

Taking Initiative

Last week and so far this week I have been sure to take initiative of my internship.

  • When I have downtime, I have started asking people if I can shadow them.
  • I have begun asking my supervisor for extra work or even example data so that I can begin designing my website project.
  • If any problems arise, I ask my coworkers for help after trying to solve the problem myself.
  • I have started to find ways to start projects that the people I am working with have been too busy to help me with.
    • This mainly goes with needing to be shown how to best use the software that our team uses and constructing a plan on how to tackle these projects.
    • Instead of waiting on them, I have been prepping in all other ways for these projects. This includes:
      • Making Moqups
      • Crafting Design Documents
      • Emailing/Slacking Coworkers
      • Testing in Software Sandboxes

This Week

This week I am on Daytime Support for my team’s automation. I am the first line of defense against any of the automation going wrong, and I am in charge of making sure all of our expected files come in. It has already been the case that a file has not come in and I have had to email the clients asking for this file. We still have not received anything back from the client, but I will send a follow-up tomorrow if we still have not received anything by then. This is important to make sure we don’t go outside of our agreements.

What’s Coming Up?

  • First Touch Base with Manager on 7/14
  • Go to a lot of meetings
  • Shadow coworkers
  • Improve and Develop New Solutions
  • Continue working on a better landing page for this blog.
  • Create a logo for my blog (Might be done? Unsure)
  • Change “Projects” page to be a portfolio.
  • Edit all the pages connected to the WIP landing page.
  • Make a D&D website for my current D&D campaign

TL;DR

  • Found interest in D&D at work
  • Shadowed some Coworkers
  • Assisted in processing Monthly Files
  • Ran my Weekly Automation Program Successfully
  • Dealt with Burnout
  • Took Initiative on my learning, shadowing, and working