Towards the end of the Spring 2016 semester, I applied once again for the internship program at Verisk Analytics, Inc., a data analytics and risk assessment corporation headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey. When I received a response from the Human Resources team, I excitedly took the position working in Corporate Operations. Since I had already worked in the department for two summers, I expected a pretty normal, run-of-the-mill corporate experience – ie. working at a small cubicle under a department head and manager and in close connection with one or two co-workers on a specific project.
Well, that’s not exactly what I got.
While most of the summer passed in the exact same way that the past two had, Verisk was in the process of updating and expanding their internship program, especially towards the end of the summer while I was wrapping up my final projects. At one intern meeting, we were told that Verisk would be hosting a formal luncheon for the interns to present their summer projects, their position in their respective departments,\ and their overall experience as a Verisk intern.
The guest list included all the interns, their managers, all the department heads, representatives from Human Resources and select members from the C-Suite (meaning the collective group of senior executives). Among the list that RSVP’d was CEO Scott Stephenson, who had recently been interviewed by The Wall Street Journal after the company was recognized as one of Forbes magazine’s 2016 “World’s Most Innovative Companies.”
The knowledge that he would be there, listening very intently to anything and everything we said, was enough to hike up my anxiety. It was a job that seemed so insignificant from the outside but really disguised a much larger and more important meaning – as interns, HR hoped that we would help convince the C-Suite that the internship program was important, innovative and deserving of expansion. Thus, we were tasked with being a representative of the company, an impressive feature for our departments and a salesman for the internship program all in one.
Oh, and we had one week to prepare.
At this point in the summer, I was cleaning up my cubicle and wrapping up my projects. I hadn’t met my manager (the department was undergoing a re-organization) and I had never presented to anybody about anything related to the company or my work. I had to go back to the basics: re-learn the formal language for things I’d always to referred to by their acronyms, discover the corporate template for a PowerPoint presentation and figure out how to cram the long list of topics I had to touch on into a comprehensive, detailed, yet interesting five-minute-long presentation.
During the four days it took me to finalize my presentation, I experienced emotions I never thought I would – I felt unprepared, overexposed, anxious, nervous and even like I didn’t belong. I kept thinking to myself “What can an English major bring to a company like this? How am I supposed to fit in with the other interns? How can I talk about everything they expect of me while still holding true to who I am?”
For a while, I felt lost in a sea of expectations I simply didn’t believe I could meet.
I lost sleep thinking about what would happen if Mr. Stephenson asked me a question that I couldn’t answer. I nearly cried when my practice runs were consistently coming in at six minutes instead of the maximum five. I fretted over if what I had hanging in my closet would fit the formal atmosphere of a C-Suite Luncheon. I even got nervous about not being able to find the Executive Dining Room (it was on a floor I’d never visited). It went so far that at one point, I woke up in the middle of the night to plan my makeup for the day of the luncheon because in my mind, everything had to be perfect.
Then that day came and pretty much everything that could have gone wrong, did.
I wore a white dress with a small blue circular design (the Verisk symbol is a blue orb, so I thought the dress would pay homage to the company without being over the top) and spilled coffee on my skirt in the morning. I twisted my ankle running around in my heels. My PowerPoint was intercepted by HR, who asked me to change a slide last minute. I was assigned the very last spot on the presentation roster. My manager and department head had a scheduling conflict and were afraid that they wouldn’t make it. The projector had a glitch and changed the color of my slides. I totally fumbled my words during practice and to top it all off – the room we were in had an A/C problem and felt like 100+ degrees. I was a sweaty, anxious mess the whole morning.
But, as typical but not expected, the A/C finally was fixed, our projector was swapped out, a Tide Pen came to my rescue and a couple painkillers dulled my ankle. By the time we sat down for lunch, my department head and manager had rearranged their schedule, I had re-introduced myself to Scott Stephenson (which went something like: “I’m Victoria Testa, we’ve met in the elevator!”) and all of my nervous energy was being channeled into doing the best I could possibly do.
Sometime between salad and roast beef, I decided to throw caution to the wind. Instead of harping over getting every word right, I decided to just speak my mind. I wanted to show that I was truthful, helpful, and most of all, thankful to Verisk for giving me the opportunity to grow and succeed.
I stopped worrying about being perfect, and trusted in myself to be, well, me.
My presentation definitely wasn’t perfect, but I cracked a joke, covered all my slides, and answered the questions as they were thrown at me. I (think) I smiled and spoke slowly and carefully and presented the best possible version of myself that I could. And most of all, I succeeded. Not just in fulfilling the lengthy list of expectations thrown at me, but also in learning to trust in myself, relax, and enjoy the moment. I went home that day absolutely satisfied in the work I had done and happy as hell that it was over!
The next day was scheduled to be my last, and when I walked out of the office for the last time that afternoon, I felt a tad sad at the departure, but also reinvigorated in a way.
I felt a confidence in my abilities I hadn’t really felt before. I felt, finally, like a part of the Verisk family that absolutely belonged there. I finally began to trust in my abilities and what I can do. The terrifying and anxiety racked experience of presenting to my CEO was really a blessing in disguise.
But please, don’t ask me to do it again.