Final Revolution

It feels very uncomfortable that my internship is almost over. I cannot imagine my life without coming to the 1776 office early in the mornings or late at evenings and staying there after my shift to complete my homework. More than half of year I have been attached to this place.

Time to reflect on my experience at 1776.

I cannot say less that it was amazing experience. From my first day there, 1776 team made me feel so comfortable as part of the team from my direct supervisor to CEOs of the company. The resources they provided were extremely interesting and useful. Starting from organizational skills, teaching me how to write contracts, operating A/V system to introducing to the most influential people in Washington D.C. in the startup community and to experience innovative disruptive technologies firsthand.

It was not an easy challenge. The work was quite often challenging and demanding,but always rewarding.

I still have my final project to present for 1776 team. The project is to create my own event from scratch. I will write about it in my next post.

So, I hope to be back to 1776 soon, but at another position.

Revolutionary events

In this post I'll describe what event intern does at 1776.

Half of my time, I am assisting at the events. I meet with clients, go over day-of-event logistics, help with setup, run A/V system, sometimes assist with guests registration, Q&A sessions or sales. After I help with closing the venue.

The other part is. I review application for event hosting. 1776 is very selective as it wants to make sure that all events are beneficial for its community. Assist my supervisor with contracting and getting details. We also work closely with our building management so we have to report on our events, when we want extended security, after hours air conditioning and elevators' working hours. I am also in charge of updating public calendar on 1776's official website. 

My favorite part is research. It is the most challenging. The task varies from creating titles for events, looking for potential participants and speakers, search for venue improvements and identifying potential partners. 

Revolutionize my career

So far I applied for internship twice, I had two internships. Using simple math, I like that ratio. 

It does not mean necessarily that I liked my internships. I mean, I liked them as experience, but now I know what I do not want to do in the future.

My first internship was at the American-Russian Cultural Cooperation Foundation. It is very small NGO dedicate to promote cultural understanding between people of the United States and Russia. It was extremely interesting, I met amazing people, I worked with the Russian Embassy, the Library of Congress,  world renowned artist like Wynton Marsalis and Valeriy Gergiev. 

The issue was that it was an extremely small NGO. There were three members of the team, including me. We did have several people helping outside of the office, but they helped based on issue. My assignments were research, phone calls, speechwriting, pitching and brainstorming. However, during any of my task, I had to remember that the organization is fully dependent on sponsors and donors and there is also an office to keep working through the creating process. I had to count sponsors' interest and to get approval of 20 different people who were not very involved in the process, but had lots of requests. The cycle locked within these people making my work not very productive. 

1776, my current internship was thematically not related to me. It is startup incubator that assist startups working in 4 high-regulated field like energy, health, education and "smart cities" (mixed of government administration, transportation, urban lifestyle). I had no idea about startups or any of these 4 themes. I spent and spend time every week to observe how they work. After several months I concluded for myself that I'm not interested in taking business. 

Through my short but colorful journey through internships, I am now aiming to work at public sector. Since I'm Russian citizen, it means working at public sector in Russia.

Career development session at 1776

One sunny day 1776 decided too invest in interns and organized career development session for interns.

This session was hosted by one of the member of 1776, Mrim Boutla, co- founder of the More Than Money careers.

More Than Money or MTM is a platform dedicated to empowering students who seek to pursue careers than are fulfilling beyond just paychecks.

Mrim talked to us about what career path we can follow and how to mix your passions and career. We discussed several options we have. Later she graciously provided us with access to her platform and helped us set up our profiles.

The platform requires several tests to be completed to get our personality and career profile. After that it suggested several matches for our possible professions and positions matching our motivation and skill sets.

The next step was extremely useful. The platform suggests where and how to find connections, how to recruit mentors or learn about current trends in our field.

Lastly, the platforms opens the world of hidden jobs from Twitter by finding relevant people and tweets.

That was great self-exploration session. If you're interested, check out http://www.mtmc.co/

How I got an internship at 1776

1776 is pretty popular workplace in our city. And not an easy one to get into.

I first learned about 1776, when my professor brought my Social Media class there. I was amazed by it. It does have unique environment, it looks inspirational and people are interesting.

Soon after this class, I saw my friend's post on Facebook about availability of internships there. I decided to give it a try. My previous internship had to do a lot with event management, so I applied for two positions of media intern and event management intern. I spent the night trying to find any connections at 1776 to ask about requirements and to help me to stand out from the huge pool of applicants. And I did succeeded in it. After two rounds of interviews, I was offered a position of summer interns.

The issue I had that as I'm an international student on student visa, I had to go home during the summer to renew my visa and I didn't know how long it would take (2 weeks or 2 months). I decided to say about this right away during my interview to avoid any future complications. I was open about this and it didn't hurt me at all.

When the summer was close to an end, I was offered to stay for the fall semester. Why not?

Reception duty during Revolutions

All interns at 1776 are also campus ambassadors. They call its office collaborative space campus, because it is campus. People work together or separately, eat and sleep, have fun and study, and of course, work. By the way, there were 21 interns this semester. 

So, besides the work inters do within their department there are campus duties: kitchen and reception desk. Kitchen duty is nothing glamorous. The interns have to restock fridge with sodas, coffee bar with coffee and sugar, PBJ station with PBJ, obviously. The issue is that there are two kitchens, so it takes quite some time. 

Reception desk duty is pretty obvious too. You seat at the reception desk, meet and greet guests, notify members of 1776 that they have guests, sort through and deliver tons of mail and packages. Nothing thrilling, but I like it. I like it a lot.

First of all I have never had experience in customer relations. So it was my area to practice. I got to learn how office space operates from within. It was especially beneficial for me because I was not familiar with how mail operates in the United States and just in general learning typical routine. 

Secondly, honestly, I had fear of phone call and talking to unknown to me people. But being at reception, when I had no choice but answer the phone calls and talking to hundred new people every day helped to overcome my fears.

Lesson: don't complain at trying things you are thinking you are not going to like, because you might end up liking them. 

Brainstorming the name for Revolutions

One of the most interesting assignment I had at 1776 was brainstorming and researching possible names for events. Since I have signed NDA, I cannot disclose information not about the events nor the names.

The process in reality is not that fun. After several hours of brainstorming we had more than 40 entries in the Google Doc. Next step was to research on the use of that names. It appeared that people around the world just as creative as our small team because majority of names have been used previously. Also, during the research stage I added about 20 more titles. Next step was finding the owner of the words and reaching out to them to ensure there is no copyright infringement.

By the way, after spending more than week on that, the team picked up the very first candidate.