Several weeks have passed since my last post, and my internship at Brave for Veterans has been getting more and more challenging. However, once I found out that I possessed the skills necessary to complete my tasks, my confidence grew. My experience has also been more and more rewarding in terms of what I learned.
After the initial phase of making adjustments and preparations, I have begun to research potential employers that Brave can connect with and that plan to hire service members. I am primarily focusing on the list of companies in Business Roundtable, an organization consisting of CEOs of U.S. corporations vital to the economy, as they tend to create more job opportunities during re-opening. This is part of the project that Brave is planning to launch, in which Brave will charge a fee for providing talent search service to employers.
I constantly apply what I learned at Brandeis to assist with my internship. My role requires that I be familiar with the different branches within Brave. My supervisor recently sent me an Excel sheet containing financial projections about the coming years, which was complex and full of statistics. I realized that analyzing and interpreting data using Excel was what I did in my physics lab, in which I needed to write a report after each experiment. I collected data with my partners and used Excel to extract valid information. This helped with my data analysis skills and made me feel more comfortable with this kind of task in a working environment.
Because I will have to look into the employment market as part of my internship, many of my tasks are related to economics. Though I am not directly involved in making projections about future available job opportunities, I frequently encounter basic economics concepts that I was introduced to in my microeconomics class during my communications with my supervisor and in virtual meetings. For example, when making plans for the talent search project, we will look at the demand and supply of the workforce, which will impact employee wages and influence the price that we are going to charge those employers for our talent search service.
As I begin the process of identifying potential employers, I need to do a lot of online searches about these companies. I not only search for their hiring strategies about service members, but I also want to identify mutual benefits between them and Brave, as these will support a long-term collaboration. I keep asking myself questions during the process and filling the informational gaps by looking at more sources. This is clearly a task requiring integrated skills, but the habit of inquiry comes from my learning experience at Brandeis. I found the history class I took last semester quite educational in this respect, as I examined many historical sources and searched for answers to things I was confused about.
