My second reflection paper will have a different tone. Last week I was with mentor #2 and this week I was with mentor #3. Unfortunately, these mentors do not seem like natural teachers nor do they seem to care to teach in the first place. I have largely been left to my own devices and have had to teach myself quite a bit, I have even reached out to my first mentor to see if he is working on anything I can shadow.
Last week, my mentor was onboarding onto the team himself so he didn’t have anything for me to shadow but we went over a few different technologies, applications, and some of the ins-and-outs of the company. By Thursday I was basically begging to see something or to do something hands-on but he still didn’t have much for me. On Friday I decided to just take a ticket that had been outstanding so I could get my hands dirty and try to work on something but I ran into issues and the mentor couldn’t help so I scrapped it.
Considering the fact that this is only a ten-week program, the first week was HR on-
boarding, six weeks of shadowing that might be wasted at this rate, then three weeks of I don’t

know. At this point it feels like this opportunity is slipping by and I haven’t gotten much out of it. At this point I’m feeling very disillusioned… I thought I would be in for a challenge and find it hard to keep up but I’m practically begging to be shown something.
I have been connecting with other interns and collaborating with them about whatever they are working on. Everyone seems to have the same sentiment, that they haven’t really done much but they actually have tasks assigned to them and are able to work on things. Some of them have structured learning objectives which is nice. I think my team is just very disorganized and all over the place.
I’m trying to toe the line on not being too needy of an intern. I was told there would be self-teaching but I didn’t realize it would be this much. Since I barely met with my mentor last week, I had plenty of time to study for the AWS Cloud Practitioner Certification and I was able to pass the test over the weekend. So, despite feeling like I’ve been left hanging I am making the best use of my time and still continuously learning.
My mentor this week is a little better but still not great. I understand some people aren’t teachers but I honestly feel like I haven’t learned anything this week. We went through a couple applications but that’s it. I was shown how to provision users in the OKM application in the TRN environment. The OKM application has the TRN and PRD environment. The PRD environment overwrites the TRN environment every night so we had to provision the same users in the PRD environment.
I’m going to bring up how I’m feeling with my director next week (in a gentle way) because I feel like I need to be shown more. I need more hands-on experience, 30 mins a day is not enough for me.