To view my final project from my internship please click on the tab labeled "My Internship". Thanks!
 
Today was my last day and as you probably figured out it was pretty great! This morning started out for me at around 9 when I connected with Pam. Pam will become the new administrator for the site that I created and so we were getting her all set up when I encountered a bit of a challenge. The blogs that I had previously set up were not showing up on the tabs for the welcome page for the home site. I ended up working it out but I had to create whole new blog sites this morning which was a bit frustrating but ultimately I was really glad that I had found this issue before I left. After that I started prepping for displaying my project by transferring all the documents I had worked on and taking screen shots of all the different pages of the intranet site. I also got the opportunity to send out thank you emails to all the people that I had gotten the opportunity to work with. For lunch the whole team took me out to recognition lunch where we all got together, ate, and they even gave me a super sweet "good luck" card. I am really going to miss them all! When I got back to the office I finished up taking screen shots, added the team to my gmail contacts, shared my gmail email with the team and right before I walked out the door I hit send on a thank you email that I sent out to everyone that I had contact with, learned from, or met during my time at Medtronic. My internship has been an amazing experience and blogging for you has been great too! Thanks for tuning in for the past three weeks!

 
Let me just start out by saying that today was a great day! I am feeling better and seem to be recovering from my cough/cold/illness thing and today was only tasked with battling my voice. Guess who won? That's right me! This morning started out a little later for me at around 9 when I hopped on my email and began to check in with Alice. I also emailed a couple of very smart and intelligent people to help me brainstorm about how I am going to present my project. As you may know, my project is an intranet site which means it is only accessible on the Medtronic network, not on the web. So I know have to figure out how to present my project, without having access to it, which should be interesting. I also reached out to again try and get logos for the intranet site, but I am not particularly worried about that. I then got the opportunity to go to a Diversity Council meeting at lunch and present my project. The site that I have created will be posted on and administrated on by the members of the Diversity Council and the various Employee Resource Groups within Medtronic. For me this was the highlight of my day and thus the title of my blog tonight. I honestly felt like the youngest adult in the room, and I am placing the emphasis not on youngest but on adult. Everyone in the room was genuinely excited about what I had created and the opportunities it presented and they were interested and asked question and were engaged, and treated me like I was an adult. It was an amazing experience to feel so grown up and not only that but responsible for what I had done and created. After lunch with the Diversity Council I headed back to the Human Resources Suite and did a little "project" for my cubicle mates. In an effort to bring some humor and laughter to Medtronic, the teams in Talent Acquisition and Diversity & Inclusion are planning on cartooning pictures of themselves for use on their profiles for the company intranet. I found the idea delightful and as they appointed me the internet genius, they enlisted my help to find a good, free cartooning website. After that things got a bit more serious as I once again attended the weekly Talent Acquisition team meeting and heard about how the team is handling the various scenarios and situations it is being faced with. From there I headed out the door and took off in a fancy little convertible sports car with the top down. I will see you tomorrow! Same time, Same place.
 
I guess the moral of the story is that you should never say never, because you don't know where things might end up. But I am pretty  confident when I say that I never want to be a transcriptionist! Yesterday I  had my mentor interview with Alice and then today while I worked from home I have been trying to take the audio recording I took during my interview with Alice and turn it into a transcript that I can post on this lovely website. Typing this transcript has been the focus of my day. Alice had some amazing
  advice to offer me and anyone else interested in the business field, and it is  because of that, that I want to make sure that I get her words written down  accurately. So I have been listening to every scrap of this interview over and  over to make sure that I get Alice's words written down accurately. Since I  started work a little later today, I am continuing through making this  transcript until I finish it!!!! And then I can send it to Alice, to just  double check that she is comfortable with it and that it accurately represents  what she was trying to say, and then it is off to the internet!! Where you my  lovely readers can see it absolutely no later than Thursday the 14! Have a good  night everyone, and to all the lovely transcriptionists out there, remember  that I highly admire you and the work you do, because I am just not cut out for  it. See you tomorrow. Same time, Same place.

 
The main focus of my work today was my Mentor Interview with Alice, which will be posted later this week. This morning I went in to work and was able to add some links, documents, text, and pictures to the intranet site. Alice and I then reschedule our meeting from 9:30 to 11, because Sharon needed Alice to work on something for her during the initial time frame. After checking in with Alice I emailed Sharon and am working to get some more images to add to the intranet site. At around 12:30 I headed home with my aunt to finish up work for the day at home, where I worked to edit my interview with Alice and create a transcript. Thanks for checking in and I will see you back here tomorrow. Same time, Same place.
 
Until today I never knew how valuable the functions "control C" and "control V" are. Let's just say that I was educated on their unending value. Today I worked from home copied an entire calendar from Outlook onto the calendar for the site that I am creating. I also reached out to Alice and we are working on finding some links that I can add to the site. So needless to say today was pretty slow and dull but at the same time I learned about the value of the little things and honestly I am POSITIVE that in the business world there are slow days and that there are days when all you do is copy and paste but sometimes that is what you need to get done. Thanks for tuning in today, sorry it was a little slow.... but I will catch you again on Monday. Same time, Same place.
 
Well as you can probably guess from the title, I ate a brownie for breakfast, much to the disgust and disappointment of my aunt, but at that point I was getting in the car to leave so I just went with it and ate the brownie anyways. I did however eat an apple before the brownie, so that was how I justified the brownie. My day was about as "off" as my breakfast. I am currently battling a cough so that threw me off my game quite a bit. But I was still able to have an interesting and productive day. This morning my day
started off with me working on the diversity messages, one of which will be published to Facebook and one to Twitter on March 15! Then I had a brief phone interview with a woman named Nora McElroy who shared with me about her  experience in the field of graphic design and marketing. After that I had a
  meeting with Sharon and Alice where I showed them what I had done on the  Intranet site and I got some feedback from them as to what they would like me  to add/ change. After that, I got to sit in and take notes on a meeting with  the Talent Acquisition and Diversity & Inclusion team. We went over the
 results of a recent survey of Medtronic employees in the Human Resources  department and talked about some of the issues that had arisen. We then transitioned into solution finding. It was really interesting to see the team work together on this and to hear their ideas and thoughts about their impact in the company, how their role was appreciated, and ultimately where they see their future in the company. Throughout the meeting they remained optimistic even as they found that there were things that they could not directly change and that was really inspiring for me to see. Even in our humanities class we have discussed problems and aired our grievances and tried to approach solutions. The way the team did it was admirable, they focused initially on the negative things yet even without meaning to they were able to transition the problems that they saw into potential solutions. This was an incredible part of my day, getting to see the applications of business management and how different strategies work and don’t work on a real level was really informative to me and it was awesome to see how much Medtronic cares about its employees and how they feel about where they are in their job and career. The meeting lasted from 10:20 to 1:15 and when I got out I worked some more on finalizing the diversity messages for  Facebook and Twitter, as well as working some more on the intranet site, though  the highlight of my day was definitely my meeting with the team! I’ll see you  tomorrow! Same time, Same place.
 
To change things up a bit let's start by talking about yesterday. Yesterday when I ended work for the day I had a couple of things that I was waiting for responses for and today I got them! When I came into work today and checked my email I found that the Medtronic marketer that I mentioned yesterday (whose name is Nora McElroy FYI) accepted my meeting and tha means that tomorrow from 10am to 11 am I get to talk with her about her career, background and how she got the job she has now. I was also able to reach out to another woman named Michelle who is helping me to get a logo type of image for the intranet site that I am creating. This morning I was able to once again attend the weekly team meeting for Talent Acquisition and Diversity & Inclusion which was really interesting. After brief presentations from three team members two people came into the meeting from the company GreenJobInterview.com. GreenJobInterview is a really neat company that is allowing and promoting the use of technology during the interviewing process. By allowing people to interview with webcams GreenJob allows large global companies like Medtronic to interview people worldwide without having fly people across the globe, allowing them to be more cost efficient and sensitive to environmental problems. After the team meeting I went and had lunch and visited China and India :). Actually I didn't physically go to China or India but I did get to hear an Human Resources employee named Victor talk about his recent trip to both China and India. Medtronic is a global company and as such they feel the need to understand the cultures and differences between countries and how they can best meet the needs of people in countries around the world. After an awesome time of presenting, sharing pictures, and telling stories I headed back to my cubicle and continued to work on my intranet site. Today I added some pictures in an effort to continue to refine my work. I was also able to schedule a meeting for tomorrow with Sharon and Alice so that we can look at what I have done on the site so far, I can get their feedback, and we can discuss what they ultimately would like to see/ be able to do on the site. I am also in the process of trying to get my first message about diversity posted onto facebook so hopefully I can get that together this week. Thanks for checking in and I hope to see you back here tomorrow. Same time, Same place.
 
Today I saw a little less sunny side of California as it was cloudy all day long. But it was okay because today was a work from home day so I cranked up the heat and curled up under a comforter and busted out some work. It might have looked a little too cozy for working but trust me I was not sleeping!  Today I was going to listen in on the business meeting of another branch of Medtronic but it got moved to next week so hopefully I can still do that! Everything finally went through for me to be able to work remotely and access the Medtronic server and work on my intranet site and not just look at my Outlook and type in Microsoft Word. For several hours today I was a multi-tasking machine as I sat in my big comfy chair with my two laptops, designing logos on one screen, and sending out emails on the other. I also got to schedule a meeting with a marketer for Medtronic who has a lot of graphic design and marketing experience which is extremely interesting to me. I was able to spend a little bit more time on MIX working on my intranet site and coordinating with Alice and Sharon, the people who will be using the site. Thanks so much for keeping up on my blog and internship and I will see you tomorrow. Same time, Same place.
 
Just like Aladdin and Jasmine found a whole new world I walked into my internship on this fine Monday and found a whole new world. Just when I was starting to wonder what this week was going to bring, a little gift plopped into my email inbox. The access information for the intranet site I am creating! YAY! Celebration time!! I can finally start working on the main part of my internship project! So basically what I did all day today was work on the Medtronic Information Exchange community that I am building for the Diversity & Inclusion team. I have been having a blast! MIX is fun to work with and I found out that there are actually a lot more design elements than I had predicted which was awesome for me because it gives me a lot more creative ability and more options to make this community user friendly and informative. I honestly think that every MIX community leader needs to spend a day playing on MIX like I did because MIX is a great avenue for Medtronic employees to communicate and share information, it also has the idea to look really neat and attractive if people would put a little time into it. Also today I used feedback that I got from Alice on my diversity messages to refine my messages a little more and then I sent one off to Sarah Hassan to get additional feedback from her. Also today I have to send out a shout out to the AMAZING Medtronic "Cafeteria"!! If you can even call it a Cafeteria....Let’s just say that I was extremely impressed with the delicious smelling food and my salmon sandwich that I had for lunch! I hope everyone else is enjoying their internships as much as I am! Have a good night and I will see you tomorrow. Same time, Same place.

    Shannon Etz

    I am a junior at Animas High School who will be posting about my experience as I participate in a three week internship at Medtronic in the Santa Rosa location.

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