My internship Blog

1st week of Internship

I spent the first week of my internship at school because I havent secured one yet. During my time here I was emailing and calling places trying to get a confirmation of an Internship.

• What are you looking forward to most about your internship experience?

What I am looking forward to most is getting into Wolfs Foreign Car Services and getting to take this opportunity to learn real life skills and learn to do mechanical work on cars by myself.

2nd week of Internship

• What is the biggest challenge you face at your internship?

For my "First week" of internship I had an amazing time. I spent most of my first day shadowing understanding the way things work around the pace and watching the professionals. On my second day I got the oppertunity to start being more hands on and its been like that throughout the week. The biggest challenge I had was figuring what parts do what because every car I worked on was different such as the model and year of the car and different had different properties for what the car does.

3rd week of Internship

What are social interactions like in your workplace? Do people spend a lot of time socializing? Are people isolated, doing their own things? Lots of collaboration on work projects? Not much collaboration? How does the social dynamic impact or reflect the organization's work? 

The social interactions I would say is a fair amount. The car shop has 6 mechanics total and they each work on their own cars throughout the day. Sometimes they'll chat with each other while working but everyone is always working hard. They even help each other out when one of them are struggling with a problem with a car. I would say there is a decent amount of collaboration but for the most part they just work on the cars their assigned.

What are you thankful for in your internship experience? 

Im thankful for mike for letting me intern here because I know it was already a lot having 2 of us running around. I am also thankful for leo for letting me buy car parts off him so I can put them on my car. I am thankful for all of the mechanics for letting me shadow them and helping me understand how cars work. Overall I am really thankful for this oppertunity to intern here and for the people and of course the breakfasts we would have.

You are probably more than half-way through your project. How is it going? What challenges have you faced? What have you learned? What are you doing to ensure a successful completion of your internship project. 

So far its been great being here the people are really nice and I get to hands on stuff which was something i was really hoping for. The only challenges I have faced was at first leaning how some of the tools worked becase they all work in a certain way for diffrent things. I have learned to do little things such as checking and filling up the tire pressure and adding water in the cars windshield wipers. But currently I am shadowing on watching them do oil changes and tire rotations and other stuff.

4th week of Internship

What is going well with your project? What challenges are you facing?

 My project is adding a carbon fiber kit to my car. It was going well but the parts took up half the internship to ship here because they were from like japan and they came in diffrent times. I ordered a front carbon fiber splitter and carbon fiber side and rear skirts. The rear skirts were pretty easy to put on but currently I am trying to put on the side skirts and I am struggling a little bit with that. The biggest challenge I would say I am facing is finding time to put it on because the shop gets busy usually so I have to wait till there's a open stall so I can lift my car.

What advice would you give to a junior in high school who wants to pursue a career in the field of your internship?  

What I would say is to start with going to classes so you can build up your backround as a future mechanic. You can go to trade school or maybe if you ahve connections already use those. But most importantly be into cars and fixing them because you dont want to get stuck wasting your time with something your not passionate about.

Final week of Internship

How do you feel about returning back to classes next week? Do you anticipate a different experience of school now that you have been immersed in a workplace? What are you looking forward to about coming  back? What are you going to miss about internship? 

I feel a little bit nervous coming back because I have new teachers and I will have to get used to the new schedule of how things will work. I would say my anticipation of school would be the same since its not my first time being in a professional workspace. I am looking forward to being with the rest of my friends as well as seeing my favorite teachers. i feel like I will miss the mechanics the most at internship. I feel like I grew the most bond with Eric and Zack so I will miss them the most.

Describe your reflections on your internship project—what went well, what would you do differently, and what stands out to you?

I think what went well the most was that I got to learn what I was hoping to learn. I learned more about cars such as the builds themselves and how to do oil changes, tire pressures, tire rotations, and simple things like how to maintained a car and filling up washer fluid. I even got to learn about how my car works in the process. Something I would do differently would probably ordering parts sooner so I can start my project sooner. What stands out to me the most is how my car looks because I only have the rear skirts on and it looks really clean with them on.