Typically in an environment like school, things are made easy for us.
Take the start of a new school year. First up comes orientation day, a combination of assemblies that prep you for the year ahead, fun activities with your mentor group so that you get more comfortable with them (despite the fact that many of these people are ones you’ve known for years – sharing classes, activities, and services), as well as plenty of breaks to relax and catch up with your friends. The entire first week is incredibly lax, with the majority of your classes taken up in ice-breaker activities and teachers sharing personal stories in an attempt to humanize themselves.
In comparison, the first day in the workplace, at Kroll for me, is radically different. Gone is the hand-holding where everything you need to do is explained in a step by step manner, with plenty of time for questions and getting to know everyone you’ll be working with. There simply isn’t the time for that. Instead, it’s a 5-minute brief, followed by you working un-interrupted at your desk for the rest of the day (except for a brief check-in at lunch). It emphasizes not only the importance of active listening and engagement, ensuring that you understand the task ahead of you – but also the significance of asking questions, and really getting to grips with your project. After all, nobody is going to check on you and ensure you’re doing what’s expected – not until it’s too late.
I recall for coursework in our school with a more distant deadline (i.e. something due 2-3 months away or longer), our teachers would break it down for us, short-term deadlines for certain parts of the project set to ensure that we would be able to complete the task on time, and do well. Teacher’s attempting to set you up for success was also made clear by how they would check our screens – ensuring that we were on task and completing the work expected of us. The path to success was shoved down our throats, made glaringly obvious and far too easy to follow.
Nothing of the sort in the workplace – how you perform is entirely up to you. One hard deadline handed to you by the client is all you’re given. To divide up the work, create a timeline, set up daily goals and expectations – it’s up to you. Your productivity is up to you. The amount of work you get done in a day, whether you finish your assignment and set yourself up to succeed, or procrastinate and screw yourself over is up to you. Even simpler things, like when you go for lunch, or how late you stay up and continue to work, is up to you!
Independence really is the name of the game and this experience, no matter how it ends up going, is gonna force me to learn just how to think and act by myself. The next steps for me at this stage is to see if I can start to apply this more during the school year itself. Procrastination and low productivity, both staples of the school year (perhaps due to how easy the school makes it for us at times to ensure academic success), is something that I should work towards improving (likely allowing me more time to continue to work towards my passions – whether it be simply reading more fiction, learning more about P/E and the finance field as a whole, or hitting the gym more frequently)
