College applications, scholarships, and graduating are what occupy the most time for seniors. Having an internship, though, would make life more busier, but at the same time, it will help you once you get into college, which is why I decided to get one this summer. As I was browsing the internet for internships, I came across Accenture’s Learning to Lead (L2L) program. It is a six-week internship program in which I learned leadership skills, professional skills, business skills, and much more to help me in college. The goal of L2L is to equip students, from high school to college, with professional skills that can vary from marketing, finance, story telling, presentation skills, and collaboration within a team. Having those skills is important to solidify, so if interns want to have a career in business or a collaborative- based career, they would have a foundation to build off of.
Within L2L, there were multiple cohorts, and each cohort had two cohort leaders. The leaders of my group were Andrew Ajaluwa and Hilina Bantiwalu. Ajaluwa is a consultant at the Accenture office based in Houston and Bantiwalu is a consulting senior analyst at the Accenture office based in Seattle. Ajaluwa and Bantiwalu wanted to help interns learn different skills that would be useful in college that they may not learn in high school, such as writing professional emails and managing money.
The most important skill I learned was time management. After each session, we would have to submit a deliverable (an assignment that we would turn in at the end of the day to show our progress) that we did ourselves and/or as a group. If you didn’t organize your time well, then you may not have time to finish it when it is due. That is how school was for me at least, so the program helped me to learn how to manage my time better and how to do my work more efficiently. It also shows me how to work better as a group. Since we all had to collaboratively work on one document, I learned different ways to communicate to others in order to get the job done.
“Deliverables help teach interns how to work well under pressure and as a team,” Bantiwalu said. “By working under a time constraint everyday, it helps interns with improving their quality of work.”
One of my favorite experiences in L2L was the cohort times. Every day, I had the opportunity to learn and collaborate with people from my cohort who came from all over the world. We learned different topics varying from professionalism to finance. I was able to learn more about topics I had never really thought of before or that we didn’t necessarily learn in school, such as college life, scholarships that I never knew existed, presentation hacks to make your presentation stand out, etc. Such skills would ensure that you are more successful in life, and confident in what you do.