Grow Irish Reflection

Grow Irish was truly amazing as it was the perfect opportunity to get into a work environment, put our skills to the test in a real life setting, and experience an organization’s culture hands on. From day one, I could tell that my group was motivated to give NDFCU the answers they needed and took the week very seriously. We all showed up in business formal attire throughout the week, fully embracing the professional work life which in turn made our project feel very professional. Our group split up the work, creating objectives for everyone and a goal that we aimed to achieve by the end of each day. We were surprised to see that many of the skills we learned throughout the summer in Statistics and QBA were necessary to navigate the data we were given. It was impossible to deal with the hundreds of thousands of rows of data without knowing these techniques which proved the relevance of being familiar with excel, a hurdle we did not have to deal with.

An aspect that we could have done better with would be our preparation for our presentation. We spent so much time dealing with the data and coming up with solutions and barely practiced our slide deck, going into presentation feeling a little unprepared and overwhelmed. Using more time on Thursday during the work day or meeting outside the work place to further prepare would have been beneficial. I also wish we brainstormed potential questions that NDFCU could have asked so we could refer to specifics if these questions came about.