DIARY OF AN OPERATIONS INTERN: I am trying to apply the philosophies of Nassim Taleb

This week, I read an article titled Do nothing: it's the answer to so many problems (by Nassim Taleb), which made me think. Nassim claims that success is mainly about avoiding losses rather than trying to derive profits. I was wondering whether this applies to an intern working in a bank attempting to convert to a full-time offer....

This week I decided I would go beyond the extra mile and just pick up work from other people's queues. How did it go? Great, because they loved me for reducing their workload, yet bad, because I made a mistake trying to close out my one of my buddy's cases... Which ended up in me having to re-start the case and spending a couple hours on it... Referring back to the article I mentioned, I could just not have taken up the extra work and probably have avoided a loss, but I think it also came out well that I made that extra effort to be of use. Next week I have my mid-term review, so I guess ill find out whether its better to do more than expected, and risk making a mistake, or if its better to just do the work you're given, do it well, and avoid the mistakes (yes clearly its better to do more and not make mistakes, but that would ruin my point).

This incident aside, the week hasn't been too bad. Half the desk is still on holiday or off training folks in other countries, which means that the remaining people are more stressed and busy than usual. This does result in us interns being forgotten at times, but fortunately with the group projects well on their way, I had a lot of excel work to do.

I found it funny how so many of the interns on day 1 or 2 claimed to be excel experts (myself included), just to find out that actually we didn't really know how much excel could do, and how little of it we knew. Fortunately, I am now beginning to master pivot tables, and macro functions that are making data collection and sharing much easier!

Daily work is continuing at its usual slow pace; I have yet to feel a sense of urgency in my tasks. Training is down to a minimum with people gone, so I haven't had the chance to advance to harder cases. On one side this is good, cause its given me time to really get a good grasp of last weeks tasks, but also annoying since I know the harder cases will probably never come my way before I finish.

Finally, having loved the Nassim Taleb article so much, I'm going to take up his advice, and will give you my tips (of my lessons learned this week) of what NOT TO do, rather than of what to do.

1. Don't be the healer that causes harm: If you're given a task to fix/correct something, make sure you know how exactly how to fix it. If not, just don't touch it, or if ever ask how to fix it. (Yes this is referring to my little failure described above)

2. Don't think that if you haven't had much work until 5 pm it is safe to assume you will be leaving early tonight. Everyone loves handing out all the work to do towards the end of the day.

I attribute this to the fact that if they give you work mid day they will likely get something back to have to look at before COB, but if they give it to you later, then its likely that you wont have time to hand anything back and they can go home in the meantime (or so at least in my business unit).

3. Don't live by the saying "no news is good news" during your internship. It's not true. No news just means that the bad news is preparing to come back at you harder than you expect.

You can read previous installments of the Diary of an Operations Intern by clicking here.