A Less Crazy Week

Hi everyone! I hope your week is going splendiferously! This week at my internship site, I took a bit of a breather. I had so much fun jumping right into the thick of things during my first week that I completely forgot to do the smaller but still very important stuff. Like setting up my computer. And meeting everyone in the office. Yeah, I kind of messed that part up.

But it's ok! Because I made up for that this week. My mentor has been away for a couple of days because he's been at Mexico discussing the importance of the Arizona-Mexico trade relationship. I learned about and discussed this relationship a bit by attending the #LetsGrow event (which I blogged about last week) and writing an article about it for the Chamber. However, I'm hoping I get to learn more about how exactly the Chamber's negotiating the current status of NAFTA and the Arizona-Mexico relationship in the next few days.

Getting back to the point, I made up for being an antisocial knowledge-hoarder taking notes feverishly in the corner by meeting everyone at the office this week and helping out wherever I could. Everybody has been so completely, wonderfully nice to me; it's great to be able to work around such intelligent, kind people. Like I said before, I slowed down a bit this week and did what I probably should have done my first few days. For one thing, I actually did all the (boring) set-up like getting issued a computer and a Chamber email address (actually that part was pretty cool) and finding out where the bathroom is. You know, normal-people stuff.

Also, I took pictures of the place! Isn't it pwetty?

When I walked in today, there was a big board meeting going on so, like the good little intern I am, I restocked the refrigerator with sodas that weren't expired. Yay for me! But anyways, in terms of the actual work I did this week, the Chamber uses a software called ChamberMaster. It helps chambers with managing events, groups, billing, and so on. To get acquainted with who the Chamber's clients are, I categorized some of their most important businesses and companies through this software. It was interesting to see the massive range of companies the Chamber dealt with—there were businesses involved with everything from education to real estate to law to correctional facilities (aka private prisons).

Anyhoo, that's what I did so far for this week. I'll blog again tomorrow about what I'll be doing for the rest of the week. Also, for those of you who are interested, arguments for Prop 206 will be heard by the Arizona Supreme Court on March 9th, so I'll keep you updated on how the full effects of the new minimum wage law will play out. Finally, I'm getting some headway on designing the methodology for my research question, which is exciting. But I'll delve deeper into that tomorrow. Pinkie promise!

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for tomorrow's post!