18. Who were you the night before you started your internship? Who are you as you walk off site at the end of your last day? What’s changed? If you could go back in time to talk to the you you were the night before it all started, what would you say to your past self? Would your past self be impressed with / proud of your future self? How come/why not?
The night before my internship started, I didn't know what to expect. I knew that I was drawn towards entrepreneurship, but I didn’t know how to apply it to my life. After completing my internship I feel like I have a much better understanding of how it applies to my life. Along the way, I worked in a professional environment where I tackled large, open ended problems on a daily basis. Overall, I feel much more prepared to work in a startup than the day I started my internship. Throughout my internship, I had a few major takeaways. First, I gained a new definition of busy. At Sheprd, all work was tracked. If a task should take an hour to complete, you were not done after an hour of work, you were done when it was completed. This mindset was a little intimidating at first, but over time I learned to appreciate it. Also, during my internship I learned what is means to be a valuable employee at a startup. A good employee is interdisciplinary and can work well with others. Yes, I am definitely impressed with what I accomplished. I think the whole internship challenged me to get out of my comfort zone. I found an internship that I was passionate about and decided to take an unconventional route to pursue it. At the end, I can confidently say I am happy I went down this path.
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As my internship has come to a close I have felt many emotions. I was extremely happy while working on my internship, but the last weeks became very difficult as I was trying to juggle APs, school, and my internship. Also, it felt very weird to leave. It was unlike other goodbyes I had experienced in the past such as people moving away or graduating. The people I worked with were coworkers, not friends, but I had developed great relationships nonetheless over the course of my internship.
On the last day of my internship, I had a 30 minute meeting with Will, my boss during the internship. The point of the meeting was to go over my strengths and weaknesses during the internship. He told me that he thought my strengths were that I was always positive, acted professionally, got along well with the team, and with my limited knowledge was able to apply it to their business. The advice he gave me as I move forward in my career was to keep learning new skills, be able to work in teams, and develop my problem solving skills. I think this was a very fair review and I will keep it with me as transition into the workforce. A trend that I have noticed in the company recently is that the different sections of the business, referred to as “teams”, are becoming more isolated, but are still very interdependent. When I began my internship, the morning “StandUp” meetings included everyone. The past few weeks, these meetings have become separated by team. For example, the tech team will have their meeting with other developers, head of product, and CEO. Operations will have a different meeting with interns, head of operations, CEO, etc. The rationale behind this was that time is the most valuable commodity and peoples time was being wasted in long meetings that didn’t directly affect them.
These meetings are not what I had imagined. When I imagine in my head what a corporate meeting looks like I imagine a bunch of people in the same discipline. I think the difference at Sheprd is that since there are only a few people in the same discipline, everyone is coming in with a different perspective. A good example of this is the revenue team. There is only one employee whose title is revenue. Same with marketing and customer service. Therefore, these three have their standup meetings together to hold each other accountable. Instead of having same perspective, one has an analytical perspective, another a creative, and the other a humanistic. Even with the new meeting style, the employees are still very independent on each other. I was informed that before I went into the office this week there was a major mishap. Apparently, one of the administrative back end systems being updated by the tech team had a delay. This meant that some rides booked this past week had to have details manually put into the computer as opposed to a computer program doing it. Unfortunately, one these rides was manually typed in wrong: the end destination and pickup destination was flipped. To resolve the families complaint, Sheprd had to offer them some free rides. It was just an example of how the whole team is dependent on the actions of each other. No doubt, as you live this life for several months, there are bound to be interesting stories that occur to you and to the people around you. Select a story that sticks out to you from your time on the job so far (Note: it doesn’t have to be strictly in the office or on site) and recall it. Why’d you pick this moment? Is it symbolic/expressive of your industry, or uncharacteristic?
This past week, Mike, the head of customer service had to call a mother to apologize that Sheprd had made a mistake while creating a ride. The mother picked up and responded very positively to the bad news. Even though it meant that she had to do more work, she was happy that the Sheprd team was on top of the mistake. She mentioned that she had concerns that the Sheprd vehicle would even come to pick her daughter up at all. During this conversation, the mother booked 10 more rides! Then, she mentioned how her kids love the Sheprd vehicles so much that they asked her to buy one. The mom was interested and coincidentally we were selling one of the vehicles. Unfortunately, Sheprd had already made a promise to vehicle reseller so they could not sell it to the woman, but still it was a crazy sequence of events. I think event is very characteristic of the startup industry. First, as a startup you never know when or where you are going to meet someone of importance. Also, there are opportunities everywhere if you work hard enough and are diligent. I think this was also a great example of how employees have to be interdisciplinary to work here: everyone's jobs overlap. This event got me think about the type of employee that Sheprd is looking for and needs. Mike’s specialty is customer service but he had to understand enough about other parts of business to be able to offer the car. He understood the companies goals, even when it did not directly connect to his job responsibilities. I think a major take away from this is that if I want to be valuable to a startup, I not only need to be good at a specialty, but be competent in other people’s expertises as well. This past Wednesday, I worked out of the Newton Innovation Center for the first time. The Newton Innovation Center is a co-working space in Newton Corner. After spending the day there, I noticed some differences compared to Spaces, Sheprd’s primary co-working space. The locations of the two co-working spaces are remarkably different. Spaces is located on Newbury Street, a hub of activity in downtown Boston. The NIC is located in a residential community in the suburbs and its physical location is a house that must be at least 200 years old. While Spaces has a lot of teams, I noticed that at the NIC there were more individuals working by themselves and in smaller teams. Another detail I noticed at the NIC was that it was very busy in the morning, but by the afternoon many people had left. I assume that this is because some people are only working on their startup part time.
The main reason I was at the NIC this day was because Sheprd’s drivers were coming in to have their cars inspected, have their knowledge tested on the new driver app, and give general feedback. Sheprd’s vehicles are 7D certified which means there are some materials that have to be in the car to meet the certification. An example of this would be a first aid kit. However, there are other things in the car that don’t have to be in the cars, but Sheprd wants them there to give the users a better experience. This would be something like a Kindle or fruit snacks. Items like these are added and taken away based on Sheprd’s management’s decisions. Overall, routine checks of the cars allow Sheprd to maintain its 7D certification and get needed materials into the vehicles. My main task in Newton was to perform these car inspections, and I ended up inspecting six cars. I also had the opportunity to meet several drivers. I was surprised how passionate all the drivers were about the service. Two drivers in particular gave tons of feedback and suggests to the service. One in particular was trying to get the service to expand to Braintree. As I think about what the company needs to do to succeed, having passionate and willing drivers will be very important. What does it mean to be an employee of a company/group/industry? Declare your definition here. Then, reflect on it.
When I started my internship, I thought about the definition of an employee very simply. I thought that an employee is someone who agrees to perform a certain job on a consistent basis and in return receives a salary. People choose where they work based on their interests, but far and away the main motivator is money, I reasoned. If a person was wealthy enough to not have to work again, they most likely wouldn’t, right? On a basic level this is what an employee is, but recently I have thought more about what it means to be an employee. Before signing an offer letter, someone looking for a job has many choices of where to work. Because some jobs don’t match this person’s interest, many potential employment opportunities are eliminated immediately. I have now started to think about other factors that might affect why someone, myself included, would pick a certain job over another. When someone agrees to a job, they are agreeing to perform labor and listen to a chain of command. Some people do not like to listen to authoritative figures, so their potential boss’ leadership style could affect if they want to work there. Some jobs have flexible hours and can be done remotely, while others can’t. It was eye opening to me, once I started thinking about it, how many different factors beyond compensation and job description could go into a person’s decision of where they want to work. By working at Sheprd, employees are agreeing to work in the company’s work environment. Their expertise is needed across many facets of the business, not just their department. Furthermore, some days their hours will be extended if a deadline needs to be met. One positive however is that they can have a large impact on the success, or lack thereof, of the business. When I originally started my internship, I was naive in many ways. I think many of my fellow interns would agree that looking back, some of their previous thoughts look silly now. For many career paths, we build up preconceived ideas of what a profession is like. However, unless you are actually doing the job, it is very difficult to know how a professional in the field spends the hours of their workday and what skills they actually need to perform their job. Experiencing a profession first hand is one of the major benefits of doing a Capstone internship.
To be honest, when I started my internship I thought entrepreneurship was the antithesis of traditional schooling. I had heard the stories of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, individuals who quit prestigious universities to start their respective businesses. I thought that being an entrepreneur required a skill set that was not focused on in traditional schooling. Thus, through this logic I believed that most of what I had learned in my K-12 education was not helpful because I want to be an entrepreneur. This week changed my outlook. At the beginning of the week, I was assigned to make the script for a video that would be used to teach drivers how to use the Sheprd App. As I was writing, the script felt like a fairly easy task. What I soon realized was that writing the script was very similar to the public speaking class I had taken my sophomore year. I wasn’t presenting the script in front of an audience, but I was trying to get a clear message across like I had when I wrote speeches. Later in the week, I was assigned to make a depreciation curve that represented the value of Sheprd’s vehicles. Using data points to find a curve of best fit was directly related to the calculus class I have been taking concurrently. Though our current education system might not be the ideal way to “educate” children, I think that skills that are taught in school indirectly help further young adults’ careers. 15. Does your industry take pains to take care of the little things? How/why not?
In the transportation industry overall, little things are very important to a company's success. Most transportation services involve moving vehicles going at high speeds. Safety is hopefully the number one priority at every company, thus small details are important. However, many of these services run on a high frequency basis where small problems are inevitable. Overall, the transportation industry is large and different services choose to value the little things to different degrees. The MBTA, Uber, and Lyft all operate at very high volumes. Most of their customers are looking for an efficient service that will get them to their desired destination. Therefore, a slight problem with a car or bus is not that important in the scene of the business as long as the majority of customers stay happy. One undesirable experience will mostly likely not lose a customer as long as the service does what it promises consistently. Though I do not have experience working at these companies, I can imagine that the focus would be on bigger things to keep the company growing and investors happy. From Sheprd’s perspective, the little things are of utmost importance. It’s target market is kids. Any time children are involved, the little things must be taken care of. For a short period of time, Sheprd is fully responsible for the wellbeing of a child. Furthermore, to cultivate a loyal customer base, all problems must be treated seriously. Problems as little as a malfunctioning Kindle or as big as an intoxicated driver could severely hurt the business. At the beginning of the week, I had one of my first big deadlines as an intern. I have been assigned to organizing applications for events, accelerators, and other programs for Sheprd. One program in particular that the Sheprd team identified as important was MassChallenge. MassChallenge is one of the most prominent startup accelerators in the Greater Boston Area. If Sheprd were to get accepted into this program, they would receive many useful resources such as mentors, office space, legal support, etc. The deadline to apply for MassChallenge was this past Wednesday. I spent a good amount of time early this week making sure that the whole 7 page application was completed and that Sheprd was putting its best foot forward.
I was able to get extra time in the office this week because of MCAS scheduling and Good Friday. On Friday, I was assigned with one of my colleagues, Stephen, to put new decals on the Land Rovers. The marketing team has designed a new logo for the company and wanted the new logo (and color scheme) on the cars. To do this, Stephen called each Rover to come in, spaced out a half an hour apart. This task did not go well to say the least. First, we tried to put the decals on outside in a parking lot, because it was lighter than in the garage where Sheprd rents parking spaces. However, we were soon kicked out of the parking lot by a cranky old lady. Once in the garage, we realized that the previous decals were made up of many individual decals. This means all letters on the car had to be individually scrapped off with the old gift cards we were using. Once we finally got all of the old decals off our first car, we realized the biggest problem of all. In the order of new decals, only one type of decal had arrived in the package. This means that the Rovers couldn’t be completely set up and we had to cancel the rest of the appointments. It was not a good sequence events, but it showed that in a startup, so many unpredictable things occur. Do research on your industry. Investigate websites of competitors or sister branches, find articles published about your industry. What does each say about itself? What do others say about it? Is there a disconnect, or are they in line with each other?
Opinions on services in the transportation industry are very diverse, but I think many opinions are negative. When people travel, they expect to arrive on time. Anything other than this perfect scenario leads to complaints which is why I think some transportation services have a negative connotation. Most travelers don’t praise a successful trip, however anything except a successful trip could end up as a negative experience. A quick google search of “Lyft” or “Uber” will support this theory. Though there are some positive articles such as ones about their new features, a majority are negative articles. These articles include everything from sexual assault allegations to crashes to crazy drivers. To be fair, these headlines alone do not suggest that these services are bad. It makes sense from the publishers of the article’s perspective: the negative articles are the ones that get read the most. “Uber completes 10 flawless rides in a row” is not as captivating as a story about a crash. Sheprd’s media coverage seems to be much more positive than the rest of the transportation industry. Most of their publicity so far has come from local blogs and online newspapers which I think generally offer more favorable reviews. In addition, Sheprd’s service prioritizes children’s safety first which is different than other transportation companies. Furthermore, if a problem occurs at Sheprd, it most likely won’t be publicized on a national scale and can be handled quickly. As Sheprd continues to expand, I wonder if its perception to the outside world, and media companies specifically, will change. |
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