Taking Initiative at Acxiom

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.