Minh N. Tran 35541835 BA 4111 – Final Paper

Education – My foundation for the real world

Nowadays, one can safely assume that a college education is implicitly incomplete without any internship experience. Given the increasing competition in a flat world, employers are looking for more than perfect GPA. What distinguishes future employees from the other students is an understanding of how the real process works. During our final two years in college, internship offers students a unique opportunity to measure where we are in the transition to the real world, and how we can prepare for this transition. For an international student living in a foreign country, an internship experience proves to be even more crucial to my success. But a strong educational background must be in place before one touches an internship. Having said that, I am grateful to my education at Southern Methodist University for equipping me with the tools I need for my internship success. My experience with Pinnacle Technical Resources this past summer has proven just that. Given the quality and challenges that SMU course load provide for transfer students, overcoming difficulties during my transition from a two year college has made me more confident in my ability to manage obstacles. When I transferred from Richland College a year ago, I did not expect the environment between the two institutions to be so different. With limited resources, I couldn’t avoid feeling felt lost among other talented students during the beginning. But I also believed in a level playing field, and my ability to adjust to a higher level of academia. It was the same situation for me when I entered my first real-world experience. The academic environment does not apply here, and there is not an explicit process to follow. But I did it because I was confident that I could complete an assigned project. After all, I have been used to adjusting to changes to figure out the right approach during my transition to SMU. Why can I not do it again? I recalled being told that we go to college to learn how to learn, simple as that. With what I learned during my freshman year would be outdated by the time I became a junior, I believe this saying. My upper level business classes consisted of different projects that usually require thinking outside the box, like fun and creative ways to teach the class, how to present a dry topic…etc. It is not so much concrete instructions that I would receive from a professor, but rather the ones that I came up for myself. Instead of going to the professors and asking for directions, I learned how to make reasonable assumptions and think critically. During my internship, when given a project, there were usually little, if any, instructions except during my training. After I learned about the resources available in the office, it was up to me to determine how to carry out the assigned projects. For me, this is not a difficult task, because I have been practicing this skill during my time at SMU. One of the most important factors that I decided to come to SMU is the uniqueness of the academic