Importance Of Internship At Alva Reputation Analysis Company

Submitted By zijunfan
Words: 1576
Pages: 7

I have been doing the internship at Alva Reputation Analysis Company for three weeks in London. The company is pretty young that starts in 2009 by three person, and it uses a highly complex system of layered algorithms to constantly track and seek out reputational data reference points. Their system processes content from millions of sources in real time with an ‘always-on’ cloud based global reputational analysis system For the past three weeks, I think I have been through the first two stages of internship : anticipation and disillusionment. I have to say that the internship is much different than I anticipated, it is busier and more intense than I thought. As an intern, sometimes I have to stay until 7pm to finish the task they give to me, even they never ask me to hurry but they do say a time when they want it. Thus, I always feel a lot of pressure since I am always afraid that I cannot handle or finish the work my supervisor gives to me or I would make a lot of mistakes during in the work which may make them think I am not a good worker.
What I basically do in the first week is to research the news for the client company and its competitors, classify each news into five categories, and then judge the sentiment of each news. It first sounds easy to me, but then it becomes a challenge to me, since I find out that it consumes tons of time to read every news story and sometimes it is hard to judge the sentiment or drivers for the news. So, as a beginner, I am not only very slow in reading the articles since I don’t want to make any mistake, but also have lots of questions and confusions. Also, everyone in the office, including CEO and my supervisor, is very busy all the time, so sometimes I don’t know whether it is appropriate to ask them questions frequently.
Another challenge for me is that, when I feel like I find a good way to read the articles and judge the sentiment for the news, they will give another task that is totally different from the previous one. The good part of it is that I can learn new staff and learn more about the company, while on the other side, I have to ‘restart’ the process again, from ‘slow’ to ‘similar’ to ‘fast’.
Speaking of disillusionment, I begin to doubt the application of my major knowledge of mathematics, since I haven’t apply any of my learning from school into my internship work, even though I have been informed that working is not always related to the class, I never expect the difference would be that large. I start wondering that whether this is the type of work I want after graduate. Maybe it is too early to judge the company or the work applying to my major, I believe as more as I know about the company, I would get a better understanding of the internship.

2nd blog

After the first three intense weeks, this forth week seems smoother to me. I always prepare a worse expectation to my work, for example, today will be busier, or there would be more challenges to me. If it was, then I have psychological preparation for that; if it was better, then I will feel good. So, this week turns out good for me, since it is not as busier as I expected. My supervisor took Thursday and Friday off this week and left some work for me to finish by Friday, however, I finished my work by Thursday. Then on Friday, I can help other intern to do their work, which makes me feel that I did make some improvement last three weeks. Also, after reading the article on moodle, I start observing the culture in my company. My company is a reputation analysis company, and its philosophy is “know where you stand”. Since the company is very young, it still in the stage where it try to collect more clients for business. I also notice that this company has at least 4 intern students, including me, work here for certain days a week, which shows that the company is extending its networking and welcome new blood into its place. As far as I observe, most employee here works about 10 hours per day since