Intern Insights: From Pencil Pusher to Blogger

With August just days away, I’d like to take this opportunity to change gears reflect on the past two months I spent working at Murray & MacDonald. I have taken much away from projects, meetings, and simply socializing with co-workers and with a month left I don’t expect that to stop.

I never expected to be a blogger and it was certainly a shock to blog as much as I have thus far. At Bentley, I’m a Corporate Finance and Accounting major. My specialty is crunching numbers, using ratios, and composing journal entries for everything from depreciation to gains and losses on equity. From the get-go, I was responsible for one blog post per week, the one I’m writing now. “Intern Insights” was the title delegated to my series of blog posts, considering how insightful I am (wink wink). As the summer progressed, I was handed more and more blogging responsibility, writing three posts per week on average. Topics range from insurance tips, discounts customers might not know about, current events, and my insightful, witty observations. To date, I have written 25 blog posts. That’s approximately 25 more than I wrote in my 20 years on this Earth prior to joining Murray & MacDonald.

Marketing is another area my skills aren't vested in. To reiterate, I’m a Corporate Finance and Accounting major. To date, I have taken one course in marketing and the extent of my marketing knowledge are the four P’s: Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. Fortunately, I don’t play as big a role in marketing as I have in blogging and social media, though those are forms of promotion as well. What I have been able to offer the agency is another set of ears and a different perspective, adding tidbits here and there to discussions and affecting the decisions we choose to make. I like to think that as a 20 year-old college student, I can offer the perspective my peers and I have when it comes to insurance, which is invaluable information to an industry. I might not be a marketing genius, I would not bet on myself to generate thousands in new business, but it has been an excellent learning experience to sit in and listen to the agency’s approach to promotion and target markets.

I’m not trying to toot my own horn, but the financial department may be the place I have had the most tangible effect. To say that our accountant owes me a lot of ice cream would be a drastic understatement. If I were to put a number to it, I’d say I should have three gallons of ice cream coming my way before the summer is up. I do not aspire to be an auditor, but most of my tasks have required some form of doing so. Whether it be reconciling accounts and correcting mistakes, auditing commission statements, or even looking at cash flow statements I have been able to utilize the skills that two years of painstaking accounting and finance schooling have given me. Working at the agency has given me a snapshot of what life might be like post-graduation. It is promising to find that I enjoy most of the tasks I have been given, provided they are intellectually stimulating. Knowing my schooling is paying off and I enjoy the field I’m studying are two important outcomes for me.



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