Personal Narrative: Lessons Learned In The Workplace

As humans, we spend most of our lives learning. We learn less by being taught and more from experiencing new situations and how we apply ourselves to them. My time at the San Diego Model railroad museum taught me a number of lessons about the workplace and myself.
The first takeaway I received from my time at the museum was to befriend my coworkers. I went into the internship expecting to be unable to connect with anyone or their experiences, but on my first day I sat in on a staff meeting and saw parts of my personality in all of the people I would be working with. This caused me to actually talk to my co-workers and get to know them. Later on, I would talk to the modelers to learn more about each of the layouts. Now at any job I may have in the future I know to integrate myself with the community I work at.
Although I always believed that the best way to improve skills is to be put in a situation that uses them, my internship solidified that thought in my head. While I had done Photoshop many times during my time at HTHCV, the posters I made at my internship where the first time I actually attempted to create something visually appealing without constantly asking someone else to judge my work. Although I need to
As I previously stated I did not see an application for 3D printing in the workforce. Granted I was placed in a niche field that had a potential for 3D modeling but that put a thought in my head. “What skills do I have or could learn could I find a way to use at an actual job.” I stopped seeing my ability to stay calm under pressure as a nice trait while a deadline is approaching and saw the leadership potential a trait like that could bring. Now rather than seeing myself as a man behind a computer monitor I want to see what skills I can get in as many areas as possible to make myself as competent in any situation as I can