My name is Paul Strom and I’m a current Junior majoring in Economics and Global Commerce with a minor in Spanish. This summer I had the opportunity to intern at Nationwide in the Internal Audit department. This was my first internship so being in a corporate setting at a large company in such a big building was a bit of a learning curve for me initially with having to quickly learn the norms of being an intern while most of my fellow interns already had internship experience from the summer before. While there were some difficulties adjusting, the IA department did a great job of never making me feel overwhelmed with the new experience. They did this by having a strong culture of everyone in the department and company being friendly and welcoming, but it was also very clear from day one that the department had put a lot of time and effort into organizing the experience for us.

We had lots of opportunities to meet with company leaders across multiple departments under the umbrella of finance as well as casual networking sessions with interns throughout the whole company. In addition to the programs put on by the internship, our leaders also strongly encouraged networking with people throughout the company in areas that interested us, even if it was not an area we plan on working in the future. I was able to have conversations with many Denison alumni, as well as executives in the sustainability and sports marketing departments. We also had events scheduled for us to get to know our fellow interns and coworkers outside of the office. My first week, we had the opportunity to go to a Columbus Clippers game with our department and we also had a volunteering day at Mid-Ohio Food Collective. Additionally, we had regular lunches and happy hours after work scheduled with our department to be able to get to know each other in a more casual environment.

Ultimately my biggest takeaways were that wherever your first internship experience is, you will learn an extensive amount about what you like and don’t like as a young professional and that every part of the internship will benefit you in some way because even any bad experience is an opportunity to learn. My advice for anyone entering their first internship would be to act like a sponge for the entirety of the experience to absorb every learning and professional development experience you can.