Learning Experience

A recent learning experience that I have encountered occurred during my internship this summer. For the majority of my internship I had been fortunate to be mostly assigned to working on live deals, by far the most exciting aspect of the job. However, towards the latter part of the summer my team’s deal flow greatly slowed down. As a result, for the greater part of a week I was assigned to work on marketing initiatives. This “marketing” essentially entails going through a large excel file of 500+ names of oil and gas companies and searching for executive’s emails. Furthermore, to make matters worse, many of these companies are private and in result there is very little available public information about them. While I first maintained a positive attitude regarding my new assignment, after a few hours of desperately trying to find emails on Google I became disheartened and even bored with my task. I began to think how pointless it was that I had been assigned to this task when considering the slim chance that any of these companies would become PCG investments in the future, and I longed to work on something that I deemed more substantive. I continued to work on the marketing assignment for several more days, and as time went on I found it harder to focus on the task because I became increasingly bored. However, on the Thursday of that week I had a conversation with an analyst that sparked an inflection point regarding my apathy for the marketing assignment. Specifically, in a casual conversation, an analyst described to me how he also has to do the marketing lists and that completing them is just apart of being an analyst. This conversation was especially impactful to me because I realized I had been blowing off a great opportunity to learn more about what it is like to be a full time analyst. This learning experience was the realization that I should never discount a task during an internship because most tasks assigned to interns are those that analysts have to do as well, so in order to truly understand what it is like to be an analyst you need to do these tasks too. Therefore, to most accurately evaluate PCG as a potential future employer, instead of only seeking out the glorious and exciting tasks like I had been doing, I should instead be seeking out a variety of tasks, that when combined, give me the most realistic experience. While I could always try to avoid doing marketing and other mundane tasks, I should not discount the opportunity to do so and instead be embrace the opportunity to get the true full time analyst experience. While this does not mean I have to love every assignment of my internship, or my future job for that matter, because of this critical incident I now understand the value of getting a wide range of experiences during an internship, not only those that you particularly enjoy.