Reflective Essay About My Internship Experience

Time flies so fast, and I cannot believe that this internship has finally come to an end. I am still able to vividly recall my first few hours of the internship: I was in the Social Work Meeting Room with my fellow interns, listening attentively to Dr Isabel’s briefing on what this internship was all about. Looking back, I realise that I would not be here if my cell group friend, a QF student, did not introduce me about this internship opportunity; there was a glitch in the system which made the e-mail blast not sent to Applied Mathematics students, including me. I am certain that I was fated to do my internship here, so I tried my best to gain various skills in this three-month internship period.

My first week of internship revolved around

I leveraged my R programming skill picked up from my previous internship to obtain an accurate number of eligible sample. The pilot test was an interesting and long process by itself, and it taught me numerous skills such as inferential skill (in coming up with a preliminary list of variables after reading other countries’ reports and the Code of Governance) and presentation skill (in selecting insightful results to be presented and producing simple yet meaningful graphs and tables), as well as qualities such as meticulousness (in perusing the annual reports and financial statements and creating comprehensive coding manual form) and patience (in examining the availability of annual reports and financial statements of almost 300 IPCs). I also developed expertise in using the package ggplot2 to generate graphs and heat maps as well as dplyr to effectively manipulate data sets along the way.

Subsequently, my teammates and I came up with a final coding manual (which had gone through countless refinements) and proceeded to code the rest of the IPCs. These parts of the job were similar to the pilot test. After all IPCs had been coded, we prepared the mock report, which was the basis for the final report. The arduous process of report writing trained me to always think from a reader’s perspective, write only the important and less contentious topics and ensure that ambiguities

This internship has provided me with a thorough understanding on Singapore’s social service landscape, hands-on event planning experience as well as new perspective on the systematic process of conducting a quantitative research study, hence the presence of obstacles I needed to overcome. One of them is the need to effectively adapt to certain changes; due to the exploratory nature of the study, tweaks in many areas had to be made to maintain the quality of the end product. Besides that, report writing was something which we collectively found difficult as our majors do not require much writing. However, the constant advice from the supervisors allowed me to learn through my mistakes and improve