Students + Startups Reflection

by Grace Cheng

I’ve already said this to someone, but this summer ranks number one on my list of best summers ever. I met more people, learned more about myself and the city of San Antonio, and contributed to something that can potentially change San Antonio’s economy for the better over the course of three months. The lessons I took away from this experience are invaluable and will stay with me for the rest of my professional career.

Throughout my entire time at The Learning Company, I learned about the importance of transparency in professional relationships. My supervisor, Hitish Nathani, established a casual culture for various reason, but one of them being that we (myself and the other Trinity intern Adam Syed) could openly voice our ideas and opinions having full confidence that we will be heard. If either of us had a complaint about the procedure or tasks we had to do, we never felt afraid about Hitish getting upset, nor did we ever think we would overstep some sort of “line”. Likewise, if we needed clarification on how much saying power us interns could wield, we were not afraid to ask. Granted, this kind of behavior could just be from my own personality, but after hearing about another Trinity intern’s experiences with their supervisor, I realized the value in not being afraid to speak up and creating a corporate attitude that encourages open discussion. I want to bring this type of confidence to the classroom, and I believe my opportunity to be a peer tutor this coming fall semester will be perfect to use as leadership practice for myself and creating strong discussions to the benefit of students in the classroom. In terms of my professional future, I would seek out corporate cultures that value their employees’ voices and understand the importance of honest communication.

I would recommend future interns to find out a company’s culture during the interview stage. Make observations about the types of people interviewing you, the behavior and actions of the employees around you when you visit the company office, how they treat other people such as customers, janitorial staff, and other interviewees. Corporate culture is a mindset that everyone within a company can conform to and work with, so if you cannot see yourself thinking with the same mindset as the other employees in a certain company, then that company is not the best fit for you.

For my specific internship with The Learning Company, I would advise that anyone taking this position should be passionate, quick to accept change, eager to learn about anything, and most importantly, be open-minded. Hitish Nathani is truly passionate about what he does. He wholeheartedly believes that creating an entrepreneurship program targeted specifically to 2-year community college students can bring economic value to San Antonio and uplift socially-lower communities, and he needs interns who can understand and adopt the same passion for creating something that has the potential to help entire communities. Therefore, interns should be quick on their feet in the event that plans change, tasks are reassigned, or external resources change their policies on the company. Interns should also be ready to learn new skills fairly quickly, since most of the things interns learn need to be taught to incoming community college students who want to create their own company with The Learning Company. Because interns will need to interact with all kinds of people either from the community colleges or investors at board meetings, interns are required to be open-minded. Whether the open-mindedness is towards people, ideas, procedures, or issues, if an intern is unwilling to accept and work with a difficult set of conditions, then the intern will not be successful at this internship and may never understand the inherent value of working with a startup company.