Internship Journal Week 4

This was an interesting week, and I believe that I am gaining a lot of experience that will help me in the immediate future. Mainly, skills in communication, networking, budgeting, forecasting, and managing accounts are what I have been focusing on these past few weeks, and I think the work is paying off.

On Tuesday, I had to meet Karina at Liverpool Street Station at 9:30. We walked about four blocks to a center, where Locality was leading a workshop for small business enterprise. First, they talked about dealing with capital investments and acquiring property. There was a man who showed an Excel workbook dealing with investing in property. It was rather lengthy, but how it worked was you put your expected cash flows in and then a broken down version of your expenses for the project, then its output was some charts. One chart showed anticipated cash income vs. expenses. Another was cash flow vs total cost of the project. This one I found useful because it showed when the firm would break even on the investment. This would be useful in determining the overall usefulness of the investment. For example, if you have a thirty year investment and a ten year investment and the thirty year investment costs 500,000 Pounds, but you break even in year seven, and the ten year investment costs 50,000 Pounds and break even in year six. Just looking at those numbers, it is hard to determine which would be better to pursue. Also, the workbook was set up so that if you changed one number in the inputs, it would change the entire output, so if you weren't sure about a number, you could play around with it until it was the result you desired.

After that, we talked about problems small business's have with leadership. Each firm there said that they had one or more experiences in the past six months where they had to deal with an employee problem. We learned different techniques on dealing with employee problems. I didn't take as much away from this because it was more geared towards looking at individual problems and offering advice to that. I took the time after though to network with people again and have some delicious desserts. At all of these conferences, there are great desserts. We left at 16:00 and called it a day after that. It was, in my opinion, another positive event that I was lucky enough to attend.

I was told not to come into work on Wednesday because my boss was ill. Instead I went exploring and saw some museums and art galleries.

Something that I have noticed about working in Britain is the amount of times we take break during conferences. I believe between 10:00 and 16:00 that we took either 5 or 6 breaks. They were each about 10 minutes long, which does add up after a while. However, everyone seems attentive after the breaks and full of tea, which is great! So much tea is drank here. There was actually a line on the aforementioned workbook that was specifically for tea supplies. I really enjoy the relaxed feeling I seem to feel everywhere I go for work. No one really seems too stressed or worried, and are more worried about making you feel comfortable and getting to know you better.

This is a picture from the Garden of my boss, with the Trust behind her.