Week 6 STA Group

My 6th week at STA was very productive. One of my fellow interns and I just finished completing a 3 week long project. We had to compile a lot of financial data (which took about 40% of the time). The rest of the time we spent creating a work book that was very user friendly. We did this so the employee we were assigned to could use it as a tool for observations and analyzing trends of the data that we had imported. He was extremely impressed with our work which was reassuring to hear after putting so much time into it. He told us that it was going to be super helpful to him, so much so that he assigned us 4x the data to compile than we had previously done. Having taken so long the first time, we had to try to think of a faster and more efficient way to import the data to excel. After a day of trying different methods I came up with a detailed Macro in excel that reduced our importing time by about 75%. It felt good to create something so useful to the both of us, and because of it we have been flying through this project. I’ve been working almost exclusively in excel for this project so it’s been really helpful getting to gain more experience in this area. I’ve always considered myself pretty effective while using excel, but this has made me much more proficient and has made me confident for whatever is thrown at me once I graduate.
We also had a mock interview workshop this week. We were all assigned different companies that we were “interviewing” for. I was given a hand out with the job description and responsibilities. I was only given one day to prepare for this so I got started after work, researching about the company and preparing for interview questions. There were three recruiters from the company that did the interview all at once. I had never been interviewed by more than one person at a time so this was something new. It ended up going really well and I was confident in how I did. I was really glad we did this because being from a company that doesn’t hire college graduates the recruiters are used to high level consultants and employees with a lot of experience. Hearing them say I did really well was very relieving, and I made sure to take all the feedback I could because I know it will end up helping me a lot in the near future. Overall, it was a great week at STA and a week of big personal growth.