I was handed yesterday a few large scoops of opportunity at work. See, although my internship doesn’t end until August 13, I’ve been grounded for the past week writing my research presentation to present to the entire R&D staff. Yesterday was the first day that I showed a fellow co-worker the results from my work. It was as if all of my work came together so elegantly, and just a few pieces of paper was all it would take to convey over 320 hours of work. Before I even arrived at Sasol, my supervisor sent me a research paper containing much of the background information I would need to do my job. I read it thoroughly, acting like it was just another school assignment. I thought nothing of it. When I arrived for my first day, I was bombarded with information left and right, and although I didn’t understand a lot of it, I was able to pick it all up very quickly. To me, my assignments were very straight forward. The information I was trying to extract from the research was never anything too extravagant or too complicated. At least, that’s what I always thought. I was given theoretical mathematical formulas and told to demonstrate their effectiveness through my research. I was told to obtain new relationships between performance and chemical structure. I did, and I never thought it was very difficult. I thought all I was doing was running tests, looking at the results, and using them to judge where my next test would be. I never once thought twice about the importance of the research I was doing. Well, apparently, I underestimated. In fact, according to my higher-ups, it’s cutting-edge and state-of-the-art. And I’m the one doing it. It’s weird to think about, especially since the research is so abstract. Plus, I always acted as if this was all some big class project. I was never intimidated, and I was never in over my head. So, as I presented the results of my entire internship to a higher-up, she was not only impressed, she was ecstatic. Moreover, I had to teach her what I was doing. It’s one thing to obtain data and results from your research and present it to your higher-ups, but it’s another to teach them the concepts behind your research because they in fact don’t know. Now, because of my success, they want to fly me up to Toronto to meet with a professor who is involved in some similar research. They also want me to present my results to a professor at Texas A&M who is interested in the research. Never would I have imagined all of the success that came from this internship, but then again, I treated the entire summer as one big school project. It’s still that way to me, but perhaps that’s a good thing. Perhaps those six years of elementary school, awkward three years of middle school, four years of high school, and two years of college have actually and miraculously come together to produce a set of skills that can be applied to the real workplace. Amazing, isn’t it? Nonetheless, I’m actually proud of myself. Despite all of the anxiety and emotional baggage I’ve had to deal with lately, I still have the power to create my own success, and for that I am quite blessed.

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