Over the course of the externship initiative and entrepreneurialism were the name of the game. Both skills stem from a place of being trusted and being willing to attempt new tasks. From travelling to co-present with a Unity employee in live sessions to being trusted to present on behalf of the company to an institution of higher learning to being encouraged to provide critical feedback on products early in development to being invited to provide new project ideas to being turned loose to write tutorials solo, every part of this externship has been about looking for the best solution and being trusted to find one, even when it meant throwing out established work by existing and experienced teams. In fact, often my eyes on the project, and the eyes of any new person on the team, had a different weight than others might; it was a good reminder that often encouraging new perspectives can lead to significant improvements.

The best example of Unity living their core principle of, "Best idea wins," (Unity Technologies, 2022) was the fact that during collaborative production sessions projects and code were refactored on the fly by all members of the team. Complex code was deleted when it was agreed that another solution was better for the target audience, the scope of learning objectives to be covered, and the difficulty of the tools/concepts needed to get at core functionality. Individual work on solutions was presented to the group for review and everyone on the team had equal voice in pushing for more, or in most cases less, complexity in the solution creation. Individuals would take the initiative to both create solutions for review and for speaking up to question both their own and others' solutions when appropriate. This led to a final solution that was spot on for the target audience, and that required all of the ideas and all of the willingness of people on the team to speak up to create that final product.

Over the course of the externship I was trusted to create products on my own and to participate as an expert during a variety of events. Both of these categories of experiences lived solidly in the ideas of initiative and entrepreneurialism. Creating and adapting presentations for public display with corporate branding on them without a complicated hierarchy of approvals showed a level of trust in my capability to make new items of value and encouraged taking initiative. On other occasions I was asked to field and respond to questions in live sessions and live facilitated chats, and often I was tapped to be the resident expert on some particular piece of content that no one else on the panel had experience with because that content was relatively new; this kind of expert testimony was an opportunity for me to tell people about the work we do in courses at Palmer because we live in an entrepreneurial space where students take initiative to learn and create new solutions.

The externship experience not only supported the ideas of initiative and entrepreneurialism but also reinforced how much these two components have been a part of what my own program has been founded on at Palmer. While much of the time I am siloed in terms of the work I do, in many ways there is a general hands-off approach that my administration has taken for giving permission for the work. That level of trust, that I will just do what needs to be done, is the same kind of faith that my externship supervisors provided and that kind of trusting environment is part of what supports and entrepreneurial mindset that lets people take the initiative. Based on what I experienced in the externship this is the kind of approach that we need in the classroom to prepare students for a world where they will be taking the reigns.

Works Cited

Unity Technologies (2022, April 4). Wondering what unity is? find out who we are, where we've been and where we're going. Unity. Retrieved August 3, 2022, from https://unity.com/our-company