Anticipation and Prep for LINK
My internship is at a bookshop called Leaves, Books, and Tea shop in Fortworth, Texas. This is a business that sells books and teas. Their purpose is to be able to bring a peaceful environment to their customers and to build a community.
The steps to me finding my internship would be that I had gotten a list of places that I could go to in a certain location. Did some research, and emailed a couple of them, only one emailed me back and said that they would love to have me.
Why I chose this opportunity would be because I really like the business message that they were pulling off and it seemed like the atmosphere was something that I would enjoy and it seemed like it was a good place to be.
What I hope to gain from this opportunity is to be able to know if this is something that I want to do in the future and I want to learn the process of how to start a business and what you do to keep thriving.
What mark I hope I will leave would be able to help them with something or to give them more insight on what they should do with their business or to go deeper into something that they want, so to improve an aspect of their business.
Here is a Link to their website: http://www.leavesbookandteashop.com/
LINK Projects
My project for LINK was being able to plan an event called a Lit Crawl, which is basically a festival, but with books and authors. I also researched what publishing companies and book distributors Leaves could get more books from, and for my last project I had to interview other types of local business owners. From this I was able to get more insight on how to run a business and how hard it is, and all the different types of businesses you can run. I got good advice on how to run a business and what you should in order to help your business strive especially when it is small and local.
Link Reflection
Some skills that were useful when coming into LINK was that I was able to get started on my project and able to know how to present and ask good interview questions as of past projects. I was able to plan an event based on previous situations that I have been in. Other skills were to be able to be on a computer for a long time and being able to do a lot of research and make small presentations. With most of my projects I had to do a lot of research and look at a computer for most of the day and being able to organize that information and put into a presentation with all three of my projects.
Some skills that I developed while being on LINK would be that I learned how to be able to put together interview questions as well as being able to research for a lot of hours and to organize that information into a presentation. Other skills that I learned were to communicate effectively with my mentor and know what her expectations for me when it came to bringing up my information when organizing the information that I had discovered and figuring out what I could to help her business and put my work to her expectations. Other skills was that I was able to organize and synthesize information given to me by other local business owners and figure out which was the most important to the business that I was interning at.
Some challenges that I had come my way were that I did have some trouble concentrating and staying focused when staring at a computer for a long time so I had to try and see if there were things that I could do. Other challenges were that on a day of one of my presentations I found that in order to get any books or get any discounts you had to order up to 25 books instead of just a couple. One other challenge that I had before planning to leave on LINK was that there was a food handling license that I was supposed to get, which I wasn't able to get, but there was a rush of communication to see exactly what I needed before going on LINK in case I needed to handle any food, but it was communicated later to me that It wasn't completely necessary for me to have one because I was supposed to be focusing on the business part of it instead of the tea part of it.
I think that why Leaves should accept more high school interns in the future would be because they are able to help you out with things that you might not have times to do, but also being to do important things that apply to your business. I think that when taking in an intern you are able to show them what they might want to do and giving them a real life experience when going into the field that they might want to go into, rather than waiting until college to go in a field and then maybe decide that you wouldn't want to go into that field anymore. So this internship really helps high school students and gives them an idea about what they would like to do in the future instead of having to switch what they want to do in the middle of their college career.
Although this internship has taught me a lot when it comes to running a business and I think that I could apply that knowledge to the foreseeable future, I think that when thinking about what I want to do with my life, that's not what I want to do at the moment. I could minor in business and marketing when I do got to college, but I think that maybe that's not what I want to do right now. I think that I have a plan of what I want to do in the future for college.