Internship Reflection

As an undergraduate student in International Business and Marketing, I chose Maersk to complete my internship particularly for two reasons. First, Maersk is a prestigious world-leading shipping company with admirable reputation. Second, by working with such a huge company, I would be able to work in a culturally diverse and stimulating environment surrounded by new and different work philosophy. After three months of internship with Maersk, I must say, the experience gained was a valuable and beneficial one.

Going into the internship I set myself with five main objectives to achieve out of the experience. Firstly, the main purpose of the internship was to facilitate myself with trials and tribulations of the working environment. Secondly, another objective I hoped to achieved whilst partaking in this internship would be to better my time management skills. Also, I wanted to improve my interpersonal relation skills by examining it from practitioners’ perspective, which I truly lacked. Other than that, another objective of this internship was to apply all theories studied into practical working situations and most importantly enhance my level of understanding and recognizing areas for improvement.

I entered this internship with an open heart and mind hoping to not only seek vast knowledge but also gain experience. And I can honestly say that this internship provided me that platform. Starting out the internship was a real challenge for me because I have always been a person that lacked proper time management and organization skills. Hence, I had to adjust my sleep pattern and organize my schedule efficiently. This internship has not only given me a proper understanding regarding working life in general, but also on how to discipline myself in managing the copious amount of workload under pressure.

I began disciplining myself by planning a structured timetable that enabled me to arrange my work schedule to accommodate my personal life. This permitted me to adapt to a professional working culture. I knew that working life would required me to adjust my sleep pattern therefore I told myself to get sufficient amount of sleep in order to be fresh and orderly in the workplace. Results were shown when I manage to be at work on time regularly. Besides, I learned to manage my time better at work by allocating enough hours mainly based on three different daily tasks – calling/following up on customers’ shipments, taking ownership on issues and problems faced by customers and following up on E-mails.

What’s more, being placed under the customer care team was quite a bit of a challenge knowing that being a customer care consultant required tons of patience, politeness and the ability to solve problems within a short time frame. As a representative to the customer care team, I had to be mentally prepared to deal with the ups and downs of people’s attitudes, which can become uncontrollable at times. As time goes by, I gained better awareness of my own level of patience and tolerance, and seek various methods to improve these skills. I learned how to be calm and handle customers who yelled and rant, or became so irate and furious that they hang up and not forgetting, customers who called back repeatedly until they are able to daunt someone to the point where they were honored their shipping waivers, earliest shipping departure and so on.

Furthermore, working life enabled me to come out of my shell as an introvert. I realized hoping to get work done by isolating myself from the rest is impossible in the working world. The work done by the team revolves around each and everyone else’s work, hence the importance of communication among colleagues and teamwork comes into the picture. I opened myself to the possibility of expressing my views and opinions to my colleagues, during meetings, as well as clients in the workplace. With this, it made me far more confident in my communicative skills as well as further improved my interpersonal relation skills. Interning at Maersk also placed me in a situation whereby I felt the importance of stepping up as a leader during nerve-racking circumstance. Decision-making is one particular attribute that defines a leader. In particular circumstances during work, comprehensive decision is required to be made almost immediately when facing unusual situation regarding shipments. I encountered this predicament during my first few weeks of the internship – A customer was very upset when our team failed to submit a custom document to the loading port in US which caused a delay of seven days to their shipment. Detention at port charges were charged to customers, however the customer was unwilling to make payment as it was noticeably our mistake. As my supervisor was away then, I had to consult my colleagues along with the Operations team manager by persuading him to make this an exceptional waiver case as losing this particular customer may bring about a huge loss to us. I had to sacrifice my time by promising him that I will monitor the shipment carefully, co-ordinate with the terminal operator and converse with the customer until the issue is resolved and shipment materialized.

At the end of the day, I learned to be adaptable in order to be responsible at work. For example, to be able to take on and handle more things on short notices, take in hand work that is not listed in my job description and fill in time gaps when there were any. Additionally, I found myself instilled with a positive outlook by learning to accept things that cannot be changed, and work things out in order to achieve a positive result. One of the best ways in doing so is to smile and use humor to help push an optimistic attitude and share it with the rest of my team members. Another skill that I learned during this internship period is that I must always strive to do my best in everything I do and not only to achieve superior results, but as an own satisfaction. Even if I fail, I will still be able to remain positive rather than regretting not pumping in enough effort, as I believe, whatever that is worth doing, it’s worth doing well.

I have always known that I am a little bit of a perfectionist. Facing mistakes and failure has always been difficult for me. This one particular incident that happened during the internship helped me understand the concept of embracing mistakes and learn from them. This particular incident involved me providing a customer with wrong information on his shipment that cost quite a big lump sum. However with the continuous support and reassurance from my colleagues and managers that everyone makes mistakes, I now realized that it offer us room for improvement and learning provided that it should not be repeated. Thus, this skill gained was beneficial to my own personal development because as the saying goes “A man’s errors are his portals of discovery.”

Although faced with a few challenges within the three months, the hard work paid off when I achieved all five objectives aforementioned. This internship was an eye opener for me towards the actual working world. From having minimum knowledge and understanding towards the workplace, I slowly began immerse myself with routine work life schedule that eventually I become accustomed to it. Not only that, one of the abilities that I managed to grasp was to be a trusted partner whom customers and colleagues can rely on for advice and help.

In conclusion, the internship at Maersk empowered my proficiency to look beyond the obvious. For example, I learned how to work thoroughly to identify the most appropriate solution by deliberately seeking to understand how to navigate within the organization and when faced with problems. Furthermore, I cultured myself with the concept that patience is a virtue in the workplace. The ability to change your communication style to match the needs of the customer requires plenty of patience and understanding. Hence, I was able to acquire these traits during the internship. In addition, the internship allowed me to developed strong interpersonal skills with a service oriented and empathetic mindset. Working in this internship has truly been an eye opening experience. Before starting this experience, my expectations were always high regarding the potential skill sets and abilities that I would be able to acquire. Looking back now, it has truly exceeded my expectations. I believe the knowledge and skills attained will not only prepare myself for the future work life but will also enable me to be confident in my future approach of working life.